Concealed Allocation, Part 1: Concealed Allocation is not Blinding

Concealed allocation in a research study is the practice of making sure the investigator(s) enrolling patients into a study are not aware of the group to which the patients will be assigned. This video explains the difference between concealed allocation and blinding. From the Making Decisions Better: The Information Mastery Curriculum and Assessment Program, an evidence-based medicine teaching program from Clinical Information Sciences, http:ClinicalInformationSciences.com.

[@noahmo1480]

i didn't get the difference between blinding and allocation concealment

[@richard.f]

You probably already have the answer, but just to record: I think ilustrating this with an example is helpfull. Imagine you have one researcher responsable for allocating participants in groups, and another one responsable for mesuaring the outcomes. The allocation concealment is guaranteeing thar the one responsable for allocating participants does not know the group in which the participant is joining untill the moment of the allocation. The blinding is guaranteeing that either the person responsable for mesuring the outcome, or the patient, does not know in which group he is. Sometimes this concepts are linked, when for example the one responsible for allocation is also responsible for measuring the outcome. Therefore, although blinding and allocation concealment is not the same, they are correlated many times.

[@billle1041]

They should have really defined what the difference was between blinding and allocation concealment. Terrible video overall.

[@AM-gc2wu]

So how is this different from blinding? What you just described can be interpreted as unblinding of the researchers

[@elenif4237]

wow that was a terrible explanation, I still don't understand the difference between the two. Can y'all provide formal definitions prior to jumping into an example?

[@mohamedx3969]

??