A nursing student asks a nurse about pharmaceutical research and wants to know the purpose of randomization in drug trials. The nurse explains that randomization is used to do what?

Question

a. To ensure that differences in outcomes are the result of treatment and not differences in subjects
b. To compare the outcome caused by the treatment to the outcome caused by no treatment
c. To make sure that researchers are unaware of which subjects are in which group
d. To prevent subjects from knowing which group they are in and prevent preconcep-tion bias

Answer 1

A
Randomization helps prevent allocation bias, which can occur when researchers place subjects with desired characteristics in the study group and other subjects in the control group so that dif-ferences in outcome are actually the result of differences in subjects and not treatment. Compar-ing treatment outcome to no treatment outcome is the definition of a controlled study. The last two options describe the use of blinding in studies; blinding ensures that researchers or subjects (or both) are unaware of which subjects are in which group so that preconceptions about benefits and risks cannot bias the results.