Research Methods · N-of-1 designs

Why most self-reports here are not experiments, and that is fine

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

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s.beaulieuTL217 Aug 2025#1

Why most self-reports here are not experiments, and that is fine — that is the question, and I have not found it answered plainly anywhere I have looked.

A question about what a single-person experiment can and cannot establish.

It tells me about one person, which is the person I am most interested in. It tells nobody anything about anybody else, and aggregating a pile of these does not turn them into evidence of the other kind.

Is that summary fair, or is it too pessimistic?

13 likes 11mo

s.kravchenkoTL224 Aug 2025#2

The interesting personal experiments are the ones where the answer was no. They are also the ones least likely to be written up.

17 likes 11mo

gradient_fileTL2Member29 Aug 2025#3

Record everything that changed, not just the intervention. Personal experiments are confounded by life, and the confounders are only recoverable if they were written down.

0 likes 11mo

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