If you are planning a research program that requires long-term experiments, say on the order of several months or more, then you are really going to want to do some sort of pilot study. The same is true for studies that will require intensive resources of time or money, such as large surveys. If the studies that your research program will comprise are relatively small scale, then the need for a pilot study is less critical.

A pilot study is generally a limited version of your study, perhaps in a separate population or even separate organism, or at a much smaller scale, that is used to shake out problems in advance of performing the real study. Flat out, pilot studies are always worth the time it takes to set them up and perform them.

Another great use of pilot studies is to gain information that can help you to better design your research studies. By getting some initial estimates of the variation in your data, you may be able to optimize your study in terms of sample size.

How the pilot study should be carried out depends heavily on the research study you are proposing. Remember, the goal is to shake out any serious problems that might kill your research study at an awkward time—such as after it has been underway for a year.

Using imagination and forethought is a necessary prerequisite to designing a research program. But, no matter how good your imagination, it will inevitably fall short of the reality that your study and your succeeding statistical analysis will actually experience. So, the goal of the pilot study is to find problems at all levels of the process, including:

• Logistics
• Recruitment
• Randomization
• Sample handling
• Measurement
• Data collection

Here are a few ideas to help flesh out the concept:

• For a survey, a pilot study could consist of administering the survey to your classmates, friends, and relatives. Or, it could consist of administering the survey to a small sample from the population you intend to survey.
• For an animal observational study, you could apply your techniques to watching the local animals or the neighborhood cats and dogs.
• For a crop study, you can often shake out issues at the back end of the study by buying produce and running your tests on that as a proxy.

In cases where you cannot perform a pilot study of some sort, you may be able to get some of the benefit of a pilot study by a careful review of existing literature and data. Or, by asking other people who have run similar studies for their advice on the matter. In the best cases, your committee members are going to be able to provide that sort of information.