Saturday, October 22, 2011

Life, the Universe, and Everything

The great question of Life, the Universe, and Everything turns out to be “What was the sample size for the paper ‘Subcortical processing of speech regularities underlies reading and music aptitude in children’?”


Digression: The problem with small-sample research isn't that it is necessarily invalid. A small-sample paper might be about something real. One problem is that if it were about a real phenomenon we should expect it to be backed up by large samples and frequently it isn't. Another problem is that it is usually reported as something definitive and small-sample research is always tentative.

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