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Public Health & Epidemiology vocabulary · Bias, Causation and Data Analysis

Selection bias

Meaning in public health & epidemiology, with examples

nounCommon term

In public health & epidemiology, selection bias means: Bias that occurs when the people included in a study, or those who stay in it, differ systematically from the population the results are meant to describe.

In Turkish: seçim yanlılığı, seçilim yanlılığı

How it is used

Examples include the healthy worker effect, volunteer bias and loss to follow-up. Researchers try to minimise selection bias through random sampling, high response rates and careful choice of controls.

Example sentences

  1. An online survey about exercise may suffer from selection bias, since active people are more likely to reply.

  2. Hospital-based controls can introduce selection bias into a case-control study.

Common collocations

  • introduce selection bias
  • minimise selection bias
  • healthy worker effect
  • response rate
  • biasA systematic error in how a study is designed, carried out or analysed that pushes its results away from the truth in one direction.
  • confoundingA distortion that happens when a third factor is linked to both the exposure and the outcome, making their relationship look stronger, weaker or different than it really is.
  • case-control studyAn observational study that starts with people who have a disease (cases) and people who do not (controls), then looks back to compare their past exposures.
  • cross-sectional studyA study that collects information from a population at one point in time, like a snapshot, to measure how common a disease, behaviour or exposure is.

More terms: Bias, Causation and Data Analysis

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This page explains English vocabulary for learners. It is not medical advice.