Question

Assign the error or bias most fitting (confounding error, ecological fallacy, effect modification error, recall bias, selection bias.

Provide a thorough rationale for your assignment

Provide a remedy to avoid the error or bias

200 women who were survivors of breast cancer, and 200 women from the community with no history of cancer, matched for age and parity, were surveyed about a variety of prior exposures that could have a relationship to the development of breast cancer. Several items, including family history in third degree relatives, and history of exposure to specific types of pain relievers during the teen years, came up with significant odds ratios by chi-square test. The researchers analyzed the data in several different subgroups, always with the same result. Encouraged by their findings, they submitted their manuscript to a peer-reviewed journal, which promptly rejected it.

Error:
Rationale:
Remedy:

Answer 1

Following could be the error, rationale and remedy:

Error: I think that the study faces with recall bias. Recall bias is an error which is caused by less accurate recollections of the events by the participants. It is also known as reporting bias.

Rationale: In this case, women (study participants) have to recall the history of the specific type of pain relievers they took during their teen years. It is possible that the information they recall is not accurate. It is also possible that they might be too embarrassed to report the information.

Remedy: In general, it is quite difficult to remove recall bias.The interview question should be framed carefully, like for example instead of asking directly the exposure to any pain relievers, the research question could be to ask the women about the certain type of diseases they had which might have led them to take those pain relievers. Hence, this could be converted into a prospective cohort study in this way and recall bias could be eliminated.

Remedy: