The Gedank Experiment Posted on October 19, 2007 Helena Kraemer (bio) uses the perfect experiment to help her design a good study.

One of my professors, it’s one of the wisest things I was ever taught. One of my professors told me that the way to design an experiment was to take your research question and think how you would answer that question if there were absolutely no limitations. You could have as many subjects as you want. You could have them under any conditions that you wanted them. You could get any data that you wanted in the world and if you could figure out how to get the definitive answer to the question under those circumstances, that’s step one. If you can’t, you’ve got an ill-defined research question and you better think of something else. But if you can do that, then the trick is to see how far you can back down the scale. You can’t have a million subjects so can you do it with a thousand? How about a hundred? Twenty? Fifty? Negotiate it down.

You can’t get all the information in the world. Well, how much is the absolutely essential information? And when you do that, you end up with a well-defined experiment. So it works.

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