Methodology Podcasts

Pilot study is the most problematic term, because there’s so many people who will tell you that any small, badly designed study that leads to no viable conclusions, that’s a pilot study. Any that’s not what a pilot study is. The word pilot is to pilot study, is the same as pilot in pilot boat. A pilot boat is a very small boat that goes out and it leads a huge ship safely into harbor. So the huge ship could be an aircraft carrier, or an oiler, an oil tanker, or it could be a cruise ship. The pilot boat cannot do the function of the big ship, but it’s an absolutely essential leading instrument.

And even if we’ve designed the big ship before we start the pilot study, chances are, when you start working with real patients under real circumstances, you’re going to find that some of the things you planned to do, you can’t. Or some of the things that you planned to do are not ideal. And a pilot study gives you a chance to tweak the design of your big study so you aren’t going to have to deal with these problems after the study starts when it would really be dangerous.

To learn more from Dr. Helena Kraemer listen to the podcast episode below.

Pilot Studies Part 1

Pilot Studies Part 2

 

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The result of a well-done exploratory study is a hypothesis. That’s the formulation of the hypothesis. And it also results in having, giving you the information, you need to design a good study for that hypothesis. Questions like, what populations should I sample? How should I sample it? What measures should I take? How should I design this study? Should it be cross-sectional, longitudinal, etc, all of those types of questions. The answers should be based on what you’ve learned in the exploration phase of the study. 

Next step is a pilot study. So now you have a strong hypothesis with good rationale justification. You have designed a study and the question is whether you can actually do that study. Have you made the right decisions? Can I sample or, draw a large enough sample? Can I use these measurements? Does it take six hours or three hours to get these measurements? Any sort of questions of implementation of that sort becomes a pilot study, which is a feasibility study. You use the results of the feasibility study to tweak your design so that you can do it… 

To learn more from Dr. Helena Kraemer listen to the podcast episode below.

Click here for more Research Methodology Podcasts