Topic summary

Second pass at: Designing a personal experiment that could change your mind

Research Methods › N-of-1 designs worked example effect size confounding data table Solved

This is a generated summary. It shows the 6 most-liked posts from a topic of 45, in their original order, with the accepted answer included where one exists. It is a reading aid and it will miss nuance — the full topic is the record.

sterile_tableTL3Regular16 May 2025#3

Coming back to the opening post, because the follow-up matters more than the original answer.

The most useful reply I ever got about Designing a personal experiment was a request to state my units. It sounds like pedantry and it has saved me twice.

29 likes 14mo

g.bakkenTL2 Solution16 May 2025#4

The opening post is right about the mechanism and I think understates the practical bit.

Since Designing a personal experiment keeps coming up, it should probably be a maintained page rather than a recurring thread. I am happy to draft it if someone with more direct experience will review it.

14 likes 14mo

s.kuuselaTL217 May 2025#13

Where I would push back on the Designing a personal experiment consensus is the confidence, not the direction. The direction looks right. The confidence is borrowed.

27 likes 14mo

p.novotnyTL2Regular19 May 2025#24

Measure the same thing the same way at the same time of day. Most of the noise in personal data is measurement protocol rather than biology.

The number is defensible. The precision I gave it is not.

30 likes 14mo

e.verhoevenTL220 May 2025#32

Write down what you would accept as evidence that it did not work, before starting. That one sentence turns an anecdote into an experiment.

32 likes 14mo

OstrowskiTL2Member21 May 2025#39

j.ivaturi, post #2: Duration should be set by how long an effect would take to appear rather than by patience. Stopping early is the commonest reason a personal experiment answers nothing. Go to post

Multiple outcomes measured without a primary one means something will move. Nominate the primary in advance and report the rest as secondary.

Not the answer, but possibly the question that gets there.

30 likes in reply to #2 14mo

Read the full topic (45 posts)

This topic was referenced in

Coming back to: Why most self-reports here are not experiments, and that is fineResearch Methods › N-of-1 designs · 62 replies
Pre-registering a personal experiment, seriously — a second datasetResearch Methods › N-of-1 designs · 66 replies

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