Lack of group-to-individual generalizability is a threat to human subjects research

Only for ergodic processes will inferences based on group-level data generalize to individual experience or behavior. Because human social and psychological processes typically have an individually variable and time-varying nature, they are unlikely to be ergodic. In this paper, six studies with a r...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 115; no. 27; p. E6106
Main Authors: Fisher, Aaron J, Medaglia, John D, Jeronimus, Bertus F
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: United States 03.07.2018
Subjects:
Anxiety Disorders - therapy
Bipolar Disorder - therapy
Female
Humans
Male
Psychotherapy, Group
generalizability
idiographic science
replicability
ecological fallacy
research methodology
ISSN:1091-6490, 1091-6490
Online Access:Get more information
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Summary:Only for ergodic processes will inferences based on group-level data generalize to individual experience or behavior. Because human social and psychological processes typically have an individually variable and time-varying nature, they are unlikely to be ergodic. In this paper, six studies with a repeated-measure design were used for symmetric comparisons of interindividual and intraindividual variation. Our results delineate the potential scope and impact of nonergodic data in human subjects research. Analyses across six samples (with 87-94 participants and an equal number of assessments per participant) showed some degree of agreement in central tendency estimates (mean) between groups and individuals across constructs and data collection paradigms. However, the variance around the expected value was two to four times larger within individuals than within groups. This suggests that literatures in social and medical sciences may overestimate the accuracy of aggregated statistical estimates. This observation could have serious consequences for how we understand the consistency between group and individual correlations, and the generalizability of conclusions between domains. Researchers should explicitly test for equivalence of processes at the individual and group level across the social and medical sciences.
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ISSN:1091-6490
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1711978115