A Geneticist Is Interested in the Potential Causes of a Congenital

question 7

Multiple Choice

A geneticist is interested in the potential causes of a congenital abnormality.  She hypothesizes that acetaminophen use during the first trimester of pregnancy might be associated with the abnormality.  In her study, a sample of mothers of children with and without the abnormality are randomly selected from government birth records.  Personal interviews are then conducted with the mothers to determine fetal exposure to acetaminophen.  Results show that mothers of children who do not have the abnormality did not take acetaminophen as frequently during the first trimester.  This type of study is most susceptible to which of the following types of bias?

• A)Allocation bias
• B)Detection bias
• C)Recall bias
• D)Referral bias
• E)Selection bias

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Definitions:

Paired T-test

An analytical technique that contrasts the averages of two connected groups to ascertain if their difference is statistically significant.

Significance Level

In statistics, a threshold of probability set for rejecting the null hypothesis, indicating the strength of the evidence against the null hypothesis.

Mean Difference

The average of differences between pairs of observations in a dataset.

Standard Deviation

A statistic that measures the dispersion of a dataset relative to its mean and is calculated as the square root of the variance.