Usually I have small number of subjects (e.g., 4-6 rodents) and I record electrophysiological activity during presentation of a stimulus or performance of a task. A general question that arises when dealing with statistics is: Under what circumstances is it appropriate to pool trials from each subject and do a single level analysis on the pooled data? Due to usually large number of trials per subject and small number of subjects, it is often difficult to show the effects at the second-level across subjects (the effects that you see across individual subjects).
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$\begingroup$ Why not analyse each animal separately and then use meta-analysis to pool the effects? $\endgroup$– mdeweyCommented Jan 29, 2018 at 17:01
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$\begingroup$ what kind of meta-analysis do you mean? $\endgroup$– K NeuroCommented Jan 29, 2018 at 17:45
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$\begingroup$ The standard method, inverse variance weighting. $\endgroup$– mdeweyCommented Jan 29, 2018 at 18:34
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$\begingroup$ To my knowledge, these methods are used for pooling small populations and minimizing the variance. Correct me if I am wrong. I am not sure if it is valid to use this method for pooling trials from individual subjects. Let me know about this. i'd also appreciate if you can point me to an ex of similar situation. Thanks! $\endgroup$– K NeuroCommented Jan 29, 2018 at 19:34
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$\begingroup$ Some related threads: (1) Should I run separate regressions for every community, or can community simply be a controlling variable in an aggregated model?; (2) Multilevel model vs. separate models for each level; (3) Under what conditions should one use multilevel/hierarchical analysis? $\endgroup$– gung - Reinstate MonicaCommented Jan 30, 2018 at 20:19
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