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by kbenson 3364 days ago
In a follow-up study, 249 adults (many of whom were married) were asked to list the positive and negative aspects of being friends with a specific member of the opposite sex.

There was a follow-up study, but it doesn't say how much, if any, of the original research was tried again.
1 comments
bullsandabears 3364 days ago
This is what passes as science in 'scientific american'?! There's not a single absolute number reported aside from the laughingly small sample size of 400 adults in a world of 7,000,000,000.
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azakai 3364 days ago
A random sample of 400 is enough to give a good estimate, regardless of the size of the population.

This is a non-intuitive result from statistics. The standard deviation - the average expected error - does not actually depend on the population size. It could be 7 billion or 7 hundred. The standard deviation only depends on the sample size, and is O(1/sqrt(n)).

In this case, with n=400, we have O(0.05). If we are testing a random variable with two values, then the true deviation is less than 0.5, so the expected error is 0.025 - we expect no more than 2.5% of mistake. That's very good!

(The bigger question is whether the sample is random or not.)

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bullsandabears 3364 days ago
I agree on the bigger question. I thought I was communicating the lack of random samples, but I appreciate you pointing out why just referencing the sample size is not good enough in a sense. Anyways, they practically required lack of randomness. Their sign-up took place at the same school and "requested that participants be traditional college students of heterosexual orientation". Then they obtained the older generation participants by getting the first group to hand over addresses of their older relatives, neighbors and employers. I don't think it could get much less random.
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phailhaus 3364 days ago
If your bar is that high then you can say that about literally any study. What do you expect, a study involving a million people?!
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jbigelow76 3364 days ago
The sample size is irrelevant, what people expect is to confirm what they already believe.
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kevinwang 3364 days ago
How are you judging that that's a small sample size?
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candiodari 3364 days ago
Given the claim in the title they talk about "men and women". So the sample size is small because:

1) zero variance in location

2) very little variance in age (all undergraduate) (variances of the ages: 1.33 to 7.19, so 70% of their samples all were in two age ranges, one 3 year wide, one 14 year wide)

3) cultural variation : essentially zero (?) they didn't even bother to check AFAICT

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kbenson 3364 days ago
The paper is linked. Feel free to take a look[1].

1: http://bleske-rechek.com/April%20Website%20Files/Bleske-Rech...

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