When two people arguing about a study, I often hear one of them talk about how a study automatically flawed and can’t be trusted. However, studies with small sample sizes regularly appear in meta-analyses. Why aren’t they automatically considered useless?
In: Mathematics
One of the purposes of a meta-analysis is to aggregate studies together in order to increase the effective sample size. Meta-analyses will skew towards small sample sizes because large studies benefit less from it.
Also, most people do not understand the research process. Studies are expensive, smaller, weaker studies are less about proving something, and more about justifying the expense of conducting a more conclusive study.
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