Statistical Power and Effect Sizes of Clinical Neuropsychology Research

Cohen, in a now classic paper on statistical power, reviewed articles in the 1960 issue of one psychology journal and determined that the majority of studies had less than a 50-50 chance of detecting an effect that truly exists in the population, and thus of obtaining statistically significant results. Such low statistical power, Cohen concluded, was largely due to inadequate sample sizes. Subsequent reviews of research published in other experimental psychology journals found similar results. We provide a statistical power analysis of clinical neuropsychological research by reviewing a representative sample of 66 articles from the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, the Journal of the International Neuropsychology Society, and Neuropsychology. The results show inadequate power, similar to that for experimental research, when Cohen's criterion for effect size is used. However, the results are encouraging in also showing that the field of clinical neuropsychology deals with larger effect sizes than are usually observed in experimental psychology and that the reviewed clinical neuropsychology research does have adequate power to detect these larger effect sizes. This review also reveals a prevailing failure to heed Cohen's recommendations that researchers should routinely report a priori power analyses, effect sizes and confidence intervals, and conduct fewer statistical tests.