3 ms·
I repeat, you do not need 1000 times as many subjects to get results that are 1000 times as significant! If 40 subjects gets you results with p < 0.05, then 10
by Eliezer 16y ago
I repeat, you do not need 1000 times as many subjects to get results that are 1000 times as significant! If 40 subjects gets you results with p < 0.05, then 100 subjects should get you results with p < 0.001. Doing half as many experiments and having nearly all the published results being real effects, instead of most of them failing to replicate when tested, sounds like a great tradeoff to me.
And I suspect the ultimate reason it's not done this way... is that scientists in certain fields would publish a lot fewer papers, not slightly fewer but a lot fewer, if all the effects they were studying had to be real.
- saurik 16y ago"1000+", not "1000x". Also, I'm assuming bigfudge was talking about p < 0.0001, given the comparison made to physicists.
- bigfudge 16y agoYes - thanks. The current norm for a 'suitably powered' trial of a psychotherapy is about 300. We've just got a trial funded for that number (admittedly in a challenging patient population) which will cost about £2.5m in research and treatment costs. We would love to run 1000 patients and start looking at therapist-client interactions, individual differences in treatment suitability but that's out of the question.