Psychological research is confronted with ever-increasing demands to save resources such as time and money while assuring high ethical standards. In medical and pharmaceutical research, group sequential designs have fundamentally changed traditional statistical testing approaches featuring only one analysis at the end of a single-stage study. They enable early stopping at an interim stage, after a group of observations, for efficacy or futility in case of an overwhelmingly large or small effect, respectively. Otherwise, the trial is continued to the next stage. On average over many studies time and money are saved and more ethical trials are facilitated by diminishing the risk of patients' exposure to inferior treatments. We provide an easy-to-use tutorial for psychological research replete with easily understandable figures highlighting the core idea of different group sequential designs, a workflow chart, an empirical real-world data set, and the annotated R code. Finally, we demonstrate the application of early stopping for efficacy.

中文翻译：

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小组顺序设计在心理学研究中的应用

心理研究面临不断增长的要求，即在确保高道德标准的同时节省时间和金钱等资源。在医学和制药研究中，组序设计从根本上改变了传统的统计测试方法，在单阶段研究结束时仅进行一项分析。通过一组观察，它们可以使在中期阶段的早期停药，以防万一，无论效果是大是小，都是无效的。否则，审判将继续进行到下一个阶段。平均而言，许多研究可以节省时间和金钱，并通过降低患者接受劣等治疗的风险来促进更多的伦理试验。我们为心理学研究提供了一个易于使用的教​​程，其中包含易于理解的数字，突出显示了不同小组顺序设计的核心思想，工作流图，经验性的现实世界数据集和带注释的R代码。最后，我们证明了早期停药的有效性。