Pouncing on Prejudice: Mitigating Assumptions and Bias in Research

It is often stated that, “If you have a brain, you have bias.” Along these same lines, while exploring the topic of research bias this week, I came to the realization that any aspect of research you can name probably has a type (or many types) of bias to go along with it. It is easy to find long lists and explanations of different types of bias, from the common confirmation bias to the less intuitively named streetlight bias (which we will define later in this post and has nothing to do with your feelings about streetlights). While understanding many different types of bias is important to being able to identify where bias may play a role in our research and recognizing when it does, there’s significantly less instruction on how to actively prevent our bias from entering into our research in the first place, so that is what we will focus on today.

Click HERE to continue reading or check out more posts from the Library Research Service’s blog Between a Graph and a Hard Place.