Is an Observational Study Having Any Real Chance of Getting It Right?

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"I am highly skeptical of these observational studies," he says. "There may be many situations where they could give an answer that is fairly reliable" But some designs are just not to be used, and should be abandoned for certain types of questions,. He adds: "The noise is many orders of magnitude more than the signal"

John Ioannidis of Stanford University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about his research on the reliability of published research findings. They discuss Ioannidis's recent study on bias in economics research, meta-analysis, the challenge of small sample analysis, and the reliability of statistical significance as a measure of success in empirical research.