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In my research class they noted that many of the studies have very few people in them, and often from a very limited population. For example, studying college students at a rural cow college may not generalize to even college students at an Ivy League university, and almost certainly not to the entire population of the US. So it kind of depends on how may people the study included, and how much effort they made to make the study population representative of the whole group they're studying. This makes sense to me.

One thing I noted in my own look at research (and that was NOT very thorough or in-depth) is that many studies don't look at exactly the same things that other similar studies looked at, so it is often tough to compare them. Also, researchers often find that previous studies identified something that they hadn't thought of when they designed the study, so more studies need to be done to take those things into account.

A good example in my textbook was Harter's 1999 study of adolescents by asking them to describe their personalities by listing traits they thought described themselves when with different people. This study listed six situations, "in the classroom", "with a group of friends", "with a romantic interest", "with my best friend", "with my mother", "with my father." Her previous study did not separate the parents, or groups of, or individual, friends, giving only four situations, "with parents" and "with friends," being the ones they split out, so they modified it, and did it again, to develop better information that was cited in the textbook. (this isn't in the textbook, but our instructor had us read an article by Harter describing the two studies, and others related to her work.)

Ok, so to get to the point, ahhh, yes and no. I'd want to read the study myself, rather than someone else's short and non-technical description of it. I don't have the math background to properly assess their statistical analysis, myself, but I know some people who do, if I really need it. Maybe it was necessary, and maybe not, and I'd have to look at it to even begin to determine if it was either necessary or useful. Sometimes they are, sometimes not. Jeeze, I hope that helps...