Power Calculations in Optimal Design
Optimal Design is free software designed by University of Michigan. It provides a useful platform on which researchers can visualize the relationship between different elements of the sample size formula when conducting power calculations during the research design stage. This page provides a general overview of and additional resources for Optimal Design.
Read First
- Download Optimal Design here.
- For reproducibility, DIME recommends conducting power calculations in Stata and using Optimal Design as a compliment for visualization.
- For more general information on power calculations, see Sampling & Power Calculations.
Overview
Optimal Design creates graphs that helps to visualize power calculations and compare, for example, power versus sample size for a given effect or effect size versus sample size for a given desired power.
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This article is part of the topic Sampling & Power Calculations
Additional Resources
- Poverty Action Lab’s Exercise: How to do Power Calculations in Optimal Design Software
- Berk Ozler’s Power Calculations: What software should I use? via The World Bank's Development Impact blog
- DIME Analytics guidelines on survey sampling and power calculations 1 and 2
- Andrew Gelman’s Why it makes sense to revisit power calculations after data has been collected
- JPAL’s The Danger of Underpowered Evaluations