Introduction > Planning Your Research > Designing Your Experiment > Randomisation

Randomisation However hard you might try, it is often difficult for a researcher to remain unbiased. If you were to stand in a field of pigs and choose 50 for your research project, you may well subconsciously be drawn to the biggest, plumpest and most healthy looking ones. However, by introducing randomisation to your experimental design, you can overcome any potential bias. Similarly, when you're allocating which pigs should be exposed to your treatments and which replicates should be placed into the blocks this should all be done randomly. There are a number of methods for ensuring randomisation. Random number tables, electronic random number generators and Excel are some examples. For example, if you had to randomly choose 50 pigs out of a field containing 100 of them, you could allocate the pigs a number from 1-100 then use a random number generator and take the pigs that correspond to the first 50 numbers drawn from the random number generator.

<<< Previous Page >>><<< Next Page >>>