I designed a study to assess 50 college students’ motivations to use alcohol and its correlates during their first semester. The most innovative part of this study was that I collected data with smart phones that beeped at several random times on every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday throughout the semester. Now that I’ve collected the data, I’m overwhelmed by how rich the data are and don’t know where to start! My first thought is to collapse the data to weekly summary scores and model those using growth curve analysis. Is there anything more I can do with the data? — Signed, Swimming in Data

I want to investigate multiple risk factors for health risk behaviors in a national study, but do not know how to handle the high levels of covariation among the different risk factors. Do you recommend that I regress the outcome on the entire  set of risk factors using multiple regression analysis? Or should I create a cumulative risk index by summing risk exposure,  and regress the outcome on that index?— Signed, Waiting to Regress

I am trying to develop a drug abuse treatment intervention. There are six distinct components I am considering including in the intervention. I need to make the intervention as short as I can, so I don’t want to include any components that aren’t having much of an effect. I decided to conduct six experiments, each of which would examine the effect of a single intervention component. I need to be able to detect an effect size that is at least d =.3; any smaller than that and the component would not be pulling its own weight, so to speak. I have determined that I need a sample size of about N=200 for each experiment to maintain power at about .8. But then I did the math and figured out that with six experiments, I would need 6 X 200 = 1200 subjects! Yikes! Is there any way I can learn what I need to know, but using fewer subjects? —Signed, Experimental Design Gives Yips

I am interested in modeling change over time in risky sexual behavior during adolescence, but I cannot decide how to code my outcome variable. I could create a dummy variable at each time point that indicates whether or not the individual has had intercourse, a count variable for the number of partners, or a continuous measure of the proportion of times they used a condom, but none of these approaches seems to capture the complex nature of the behavior. — Uni Dimensional