Blinding: An essential component in decreasing risk of bias in experimental designs

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Forbes, Dorothy

• What is blinding? Blinding (or masking) is the process used in experimental research by which study participants, persons caring for the participants, persons providing the intervention, data collectors and data analysts are kept unaware of group assignment (control vs intervention). Blinding aims to reduce the risk of bias that can be caused by an awareness of group assignment. With blinding, outcomes can be attributed to the intervention itself and not influenced by behaviour or assessment of outcomes that can result purely from knowledge of group allocation.

• Date created

  2014-12-03

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Double-Blind Method
  • Bias (Epidemiology)

• Type of Item

  Research Material

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3BV79X3H

• License

  © 2013 BMJ Publishing Group. This version of this article is open access and can be downloaded and shared. The original author(s) and source must be cited.