Evidence map›Paper›PMID 29915059›Full record

Trial reportProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018

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

Aaron J Fisher, John D Medaglia, Bertus F Jeronimus

Abstract readRandomized Controlled Trial
PubMed Full text at PMC Publisher
In one paragraph

Trial report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 364 papers, 8 of them syntheses that pooled it.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
364citing papers in PubMed, 8 pooled it
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

364 citing papers in PubMed, 8 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.

  1. Pooled it
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  9. Trial
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  14. Article
  15. The power of friendships in adolescents' daily lives: Bi-directional within-person associations between friendship interaction quality and affect.Journal of research on adolescence : the official journal of the Society for Research on Adolescence · 2026
    Article
  16. Article
  17. Seven challenges in affective inertia research.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2026
    Review
  18. Article
  19. Article
  20. Article

304 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.

4 · The record

Corrections and comments

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

3 authors.

Aaron J FisherDepartment of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720; afisher@berkeley.edu.
John D MedagliaDepartment of Psychology, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA 19104.
Bertus F JeronimusDepartment of Developmental Psychology, Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences, Groningen University, 9712 TS Groningen, The Netherlands.ORCID 0000-0003-2826-4537

Funding

Dynamic Network Neuroscience and Control Theory: Toward Interventions for Cognitive Control DysfunctionDP5OD021352 · OD · UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA · PI MEDAGLIA, JOHN · 2015 to 2019
$2.0M
NIH HHS DP5 OD021352
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

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.

Indexed as

Psychotherapy, GroupAnxiety DisordersBipolar DisorderFemaleHumansMaleecological fallacygeneralizabilityidiographic sciencereplicabilityresearch methodology

Identifiers

PMID29915059
PMCPMC6142277

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.