Potential Sources of Bias and Possible Strategies to Minimizing the Bias (Essay Sample)

Appraising the Literature
Author’s Name
Institution’s Name
Date
Appraising the Literature
Strength
Article of “The epidemiology of chronic pain in the community” by Oppenheimer (2010) has a number of strengths, some of which include; the ability to quantify and describe prevalence of the chronic pain in a community in accordance with sex, age and social demographic status. On the other hand, Article “Framingham heart study: the first 20 years” by Elliott, Smith, Penny, Smith and Chambers (1999) also had a number of strengths some of which include; the ability to provide a unique database in testing a wide range of Non-CVD issues. In addition, the article has the ability to identify the issues that statisticians, public health officials, and physicians encounter in creating an epidemiological study. Further, the strength of this article lay in the authors’ ability to draw Framingham community into the support of the research.
Weaknesses
Articles of “The epidemiology of chronic pain in the community” had a number of weaknesses. These weaknesses include failure to give response by some targeted participant did not give. Secondly, some of the responses received from the participant were not utilized during data analysis. On the other hand, the article “Framingham heart study: the first 20 years” had one key weakness. This weakness is portrayed where multiple authorities invested in the project.
Potential Sources of Bias and Possible Strategies to Minimizing the Bias
Bias in research is a major problem that hinders the study to yield reliable results. Bias may occur in data collection, planning or analysis phase of the study. In the two articles, there are numerous potential sources of bias that can be pointed out. First, both articles failed to take into account of all the possible variables. The bias leads to inaccurate interpretation of the results since the sample used in both articles is not a good representative of the whole population. To avoid this type of bias, the researchers need to include a large sample in their study in order to cater for the whole population.
Another potential source of bias in the Article “The epidemiology of chronic pain in the community” is the situation where a particular sample of individuals aged 25 years and above is selected for convenience ignoring those individuals aged below 25 years. Here, the researcher aims to fit the narrow demographic range ignoring those individuals below 25 years who are also prone to chronic diseases. To collect this type of bias, the researcher should give all the potential respondents even chance to take part in the survey.
On the other hand, in the article “Framingham heart study: the first 20 years” there was bias due to the utilization of the self-selected cohort as a method of data collection. This could have resulted in an unbiased estimate of the prevalence and incidence in the research. To collect this type of bias, the author of the article needs to use a collective approach to data collection in order to give an equal chance for each part...