3 ms·
Would it be the same thing to do 1,000 small studies like this one as doing one LARGE study with 1000x more people? Would the results be considered just as usef
by blakesterz 7y ago
Would it be the same thing to do 1,000 small studies like this one as doing one LARGE study with 1000x more people? Would the results be considered just as useful?
- lonelappde 7y agoSimilar. That's called a "meta analysis" and tends to happen after many independent uncoordinated small studies have published.
- emn13 7y agoAlso, it's extremely hard to account for all kinds of biases and systematic errors in a meta-analysis. I'd take most meta-analyses, even by renowned statiticians, very, very skeptically. Teasing out small effects from samples that need corrections for lots of confounding factors, and then trying do combine many such results is next to impossible. If your effect is small enough that you need a meta-analysis in the first place, that's a warning sign. Some background: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0152719 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... (with perhaps more approachable explanation here https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2016/06/11/the-great-minds-journal-club-discusses-westfall-yarkoni-2016/ https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2016/06/11/the-great-minds-j... ) Obviously it's sometimes possible to do this right, but the reproducibiility crisis didn't appear out of nowhere; it's best to be wary of overly clever statistics; hard to know what you don't know.
- bluGill 7y agoThat isn't the same as the studies are likely to be different. If one study is old people, another young, another those with diabetes, and so on. Some may have data but it is clouded by a biased sample... Putting this all together is done in meta analysis which is complex and finds things in small studies that don't show up but it isn't trivial to do them.