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"Go Big, or Go Home."

I just got back from JSM, where I participated in a session on adaptive design. Mick Couper served as a discussant for the session. The title of this blog post is one of the points from his talk. He said that innovative, adaptive methods need to show substantial results. Otherwise, it won't be convincing. As he pointed out, part of the problem is that we are often tinkering with marginal changes on existing surveys. These kinds of changes need to be low risk, that is, they can't cause damage to the results and should only help. However, these kinds of changes are often limited in what they can do. His point was to make some big changes that will show big effects may require some risk.

This made sense to me. It would be nice to have some methodological studies that aren't constrained by the needs of an existing survey. I suppose this could be a separate, large sample with the same content as an existing survey. However, I wonder if this is a chicken or egg type of problem. Do we need the small, restricted studies that show marginal benefits in order to justify the large, purely methodological studies? Or do we need the large, methodological study before more surveys will consider these kinds of design innovations?

My feeling is that we have enough evidence that large, purely methodological surveys are justified and even a logical next step.


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