For this weeks discussion on the different types of biases, I'm most attracted to biases by the interviewer. I will use my week three cohort study as the basis of my discussion. My cohort study was on the impact chronic hepatitis B has on the liver and its progression to hepatocellular carcinoma among tattoo artists who where infected through accidental needle stick (which happens to be the most common mode of transmission, accidental needle sticks in general).
While selecting potential participants for the study, one needs to interview each person to make sure they fit the proper age, gender, sex, occupation, weight, height, and other personal, social and environmental components that may make them a higher risk for other infections that…show more content… Let's take the conformational bias aspect of interviewer bias, as the interviewer goes through his selection process, he may already have a pre-formed notion that tattoo artists are uneducated, unstable, recreational drug abusing nomads. For some tattoo artists this may be true, but of course not for all. The interviewer can take this pre-conceived notion and apply it to each and every candidate he or she interviews. This is more of an information bias, because it's the mistaken use of information that has little value on whether the candidate is qualified to participate in the study. Due to the biases of the interviewer many confounding variables influence and effect the dependent variables, example. An important variable in selecting tattoo artist for the study is actually working full time in a tattoo shop, but due to the interviewers bias he believe all Africans eat peanuts in there food which makes them susceptible to aflatoxin (confounding variable) which is in itself can cause hepatocellular carcinoma. Another example is, due to the interviewers intuition and past experiences he believes many tattoo artists who are from the suburbs are intravenous drug abusers, which would make them more susceptible to co-infection with hepatitis D (confounding variable) which can cause super infection when…show more content… But can we ever totally eliminate biases, more so interviewer bias? The answer is no. Humans will always have some degree of bias, it's our nature due to our personal, historical, cultural experiences that shape our bias. Simply can't avoid them, but we can certainly minimize them, especially for the safe of conducting important medically related studies that absolutely must be conducted. What actions can we take to minimize interviewer bias? The same action can be taken to also minimize confounding variables as well. The first and most important action in my opinion is to allow enough time to do a thorough history and complete evaluation for each participant considered for the study. According to (Bauer Balts, 2002; Blair Banaji, 1996; Martell, 1991) study has shown that by taking time to do a thorough and complete evaluation through it will increase accuracy, while reducing bias. Another technique that can reduce interviewer bias is by having structured criteria, conducting structured interviews based only on the study related criteria, avoiding the interviewers tendency to search for information that confirms a pre-existing bias (conformational
