Assistant Laboratory Animal Technician (ALAT) Practice Exam

What practice helps to ensure that collected data are not influenced by factors related to animal management?

1. Randomization

2. Consistency

3. Control groups

4. Blind procedures

The correct answer is: Consistency

The practice that helps to ensure that collected data are not influenced by factors related to animal management is consistency. Consistency in animal management refers to maintaining uniform conditions throughout the study, including diet, housing, handling, and environmental factors. By ensuring that these variables remain constant, the researcher can minimize their potential impact on the outcomes being measured. This enables more reliable conclusions about the specific effects related to the experimental conditions being tested, rather than extraneous variables from varying animal management practices. Other practices listed, such as randomization, control groups, and blind procedures, play important roles in experimental design and data collection. However, their primary functions differ—randomization helps reduce bias by randomly assigning subjects to different experimental groups, control groups offer a baseline for comparison, and blind procedures aim to limit the influence of the researcher's expectations on data interpretation. Consistency, on the other hand, specifically addresses how uniform management influences the reliability of data collection.