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Comments and criticism comments on “a research methodology for studying how people think”
Author(s) -
Shayer Michael
Publication year - 1986
Publication title -
journal of research in science teaching
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.067
H-Index - 131
eISSN - 1098-2736
pISSN - 0022-4308
DOI - 10.1002/tea.3660230909
Subject(s) - generalizability theory , fallacy , criticism , sample size determination , psychology , sample (material) , statistics , statistical inference , population , econometrics , epistemology , mathematics , sociology , philosophy , demography , chemistry , law , chromatography , political science
Larkin and Rainard's (1984) article was sufficiently interesting not only to have me recommending it to others but also to re‐read it for a third time. Unhappily I then realized that as a biproduct I had been giving my students an entrée into the old fallacy of inverse probability (see R. A. Fisher's, The Design of Experiments , Chapter 1). The fallacy occurs on pages 252 and 253. The authors say: “ ⃛ sample size is rarely important to generalizability. Suppose, for example, 500 or 10 individuals are tested out of a population of 5000. Testing 500 (instead of 10) decreases the standard error of the mean by only a factor of 1.1 [= (1–10/5000)/(1–500/5000)]. Most research does not use large samples to increase generalizability. Instead the function is either to estimate many parameters in a detailed model, or to increase statistical significance, a factor sensitive to sample size.”