n = 35

Ronggui Huang from the Department of Sociology at Fudan University writes,

Recently, my mentor and I have collected data in about 35 neighborhoods, and we survey 30 residents in each neighborhood. I would like to study the effects of neighborhood-level characteristics, so after data collection, I aggregate the data to neighborhood-level. In other words, I have just 35 sample points. With such a small sample size (35 neighborhoods), what statistical methods can I use to analyse the data? It seems that most of the statistical methods are based on large sample theory.

My quick answer is that, from the standpoint of classical statistical theory, 35 is a large sample! You could also do a multilevel model if you want. But I’d be careful about the causal interpretations (you wrote “effects” above)–you’re probably limited on what you can learn causally unless you can frame what you’re doing as a “natural experiment” (for a start, see chapters 9 and 10 of our new book).

P.S. I imagine things have changed quite a bit at Fudan in the years since Xiao-Li was there.

2 thoughts on “n = 35

  1. Anonymous,

    Read the first paragraph of the linked article. But this is all hearsay; I've never actually been to Shanghai.

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