Research Methods · N-of-1 designs

About the N-of-1 designs category

Research Methods › N-of-1 designs worked example confounding effect size

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owen.bradyTL4 Moderator8 Jan 2026#1

Community wiki post. Any member at trust level 3 or above can edit this post; every edit is recorded. Last edited by hana.sato on 19 Feb 2026.

11 Mar 2026 — owen.brady: Added the limitations paragraph that review asked for.
4 Apr 2026 — mira.patel: Restructured into sections so the outline is navigable.
19 Feb 2026 — hana.sato: Plain-language pass on the opening paragraph.

Editors: owen.brady, mira.patel, hana.sato

Staff post. Actions described here are recorded in the public moderation log and may be challenged in Meta.

Designing a personal experiment that could actually change your mind, including washouts and blinding.

This post is a community wiki: any member at trust level 3 or above can edit it, and every edit is recorded with its author and a note. If the scope described here has drifted from what actually gets posted, edit it rather than starting a topic about it.

What belongs here

Questions specific to n-of-1 designs, with the units and the context stated.
Reports and datasets, with the collection method stated.
Disagreement about the substance, conducted in public.

What belongs elsewhere

Anything urgent belongs in Safety, immediately, and not here.
Anything about how this site works belongs in Meta.
Requests for a maintained page belong in Wiki requests.

Before posting, it is worth checking the documentation commons and this category's tag pages. A great deal of what gets asked here has a maintained answer with a review date on it, which is more reliable than a two-year-old reply.

0 likes 7mo

dr_okonkwoTL4 Moderator17 Mar 2026#2

Staff post. Actions described here are recorded in the public moderation log and may be challenged in Meta.

Moderation notes for this category, so that nothing about how it is run is a surprise.

Topics get moved into and out of here regularly. A move is not a judgement — the category tree is not obvious from outside and putting a question in the wrong place is expected. When I move something I say so in the topic and the action appears in the public log with the guideline cited.

The two guidelines that come up most often in this category are R2, on supplying a source when asked, and R7, on category placement. Neither is used punitively.

23 likes 4mo

k.adeyemiTL2 Moderator5 May 2026#3

As a member rather than staff: the most useful thing I did when I started reading this category was to work through the tag pages rather than the topic list. The topic list shows you what is recent. The tags show you what is settled.

6 likes 3mo

gradient_reviewTL2Member17 Jun 2026#4

Suggestion for the wiki post above: it would be worth linking the two or three most-referenced topics in this category directly, since new members reliably ask for exactly those. Happy to make the edit myself if nobody objects, with a revision note.

1 like 1mo

i.aranda_esTL2Translator · ES27 Jul 2026#5

owen.brady, post #1: Designing a personal experiment that could actually change your mind, including washouts and blinding. This post is a community wiki: any member at trust level 3 or above can edit it, and every edit is recorded with its author and a note. If the scope described here has drifted from what actually gets posted, edit it rather than… Go to post

When to run an n-of-1: this design works when you want to know whether a treatment works for you, not whether it works in general. For that purpose, it is efficient.

32 likes in reply to #1 14h

This topic was referenced in

Coming back to: Why most self-reports here are not experiments, and that is fineResearch Methods › N-of-1 designs · 62 replies

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