this is a marvelous idea. I am also thinking about registering properly all success and training of my meditation students, hopefully with an added value of potential statistical and practical outcomes.
The ideal is to get all of the humanity into your sample. So, if the less than 7 billion, the less accuracy you will get in your research. If you could get 50 people, it is poor research but still valuable. 500 is pretty nice, but skeptics will scoff at you. You're pretty good if you can get 10 000, hopefully, mixed (but well registered) Asians, Europeans, Americans, Africans, of all ages, life standards, and income levels.
BUT
I'd suggest that even 10 or 30 is pretty good. If there are 10 researchers like you and all work with 30 people, you make it altogether 300, which is a pretty good incentive for other researchers to do the same.
Let me know in a private message if I could somehow join you in your excellent endeavor.
If you are limited by class size, there is always an option of collating data from a few classes before doing your analysis. But I would think most meditation classes would be between 12-20 to be effective, especially when you require participants to discuss and practice apart from the education part.
The last one I did was on a large group of online meditation course participants, but the course has no group discussion part, so I was able to have a larger class size, and I gathered data from N = 47 which, though small, was sufficient for me to run all the required analyses.
Hi Aamer, unfortunately, I have not written anything about this particular study. It was meant to be an assessment of the effectiveness of my own mindfulness course. But that's a good idea. I might consider writing it up properly.
Aamer Aldbyani forgot to update you on the paper. I finally treated it as an orphaned study... and used Academic Letters to keep a public record of it. Here's my RG entry: Article Effectiveness of a 4-Week Mindfulness-Based Program in China
For more than two decades, various studies have suggested that meditation and mindfulness — that is, being aware of the present moment — can help reduce and improve pain management, lending some credence to the notion that the brain can affect the body. Such results have helped the field grow into a multibillion-dollar industry, populated by meditation apps, guided workshops, and upscale retreats.
Yet the field has also faced sharp criticism from psychologists and researchers who say the health benefits are overstated and some of the research methodologically flawed...
And while no scientific findings suggest that meditation can go so far as to cure cancer, some researchers are interested in precisely how the brain affects the body’s immune system...
Meditation and self-regulation are paths that need further exploration, and it is one modality we are researching that should be considered in conjunction with traditional approaches to further assist one’s body in returning back to homeostatis.”