>> therefore 19 participants completed the study (2 females and 17 males) and their data are presented throughout
Who in their own mind decided that this is a "study" worth publishing?
Who in their own mind decided that this is a "study" worth publishing?
You read
We saw this effect, so it's real.
We saw this effect in a small study, so it's worth doing a larger study.
There are trade offs in either case and some types of research where one is more suitable than the other. But the best case is a combination of the two, and it's exceedingly rare.
Maybe there are other options but this seems to be the polar nature of these studies from what I've seen.
That never happens.
Reading it wrong tends to make that happen too. Since people read it as fact they end up arguing "why fund a more expensive study to show the same thing?"
A lot of this stems from not understanding how science actually works. How there's never proof, only confidence bounds
Some points though:
- A within-participants study has inherently more power than a between-subjects study. Trying two different diets with the same person removes a lot of variables that you'd need to control for in between-subjects studies (and yes, they randomized the order of intervention and found no difference based on order)
- It looks like this was conducted in a way that supported compliance with the protocol, and using analysis techniques that would be unwieldy for a much larger sample size.
Even with N=19, the reported significance is very compelling.