My PI wants to add an entire additional study to my psych senior thesis, and IDK how to compromise with her.
I'm in a clinical psych lab, and am doing a senior thesis on phantom limbs and surgical decision making in transgender individuals. I showed my models to my PI and she agreed to sponsor me. My portion of the study only requires 4 scales.
My PI wants to add additional variables for the sole purpose of publishing more papers. Things completely unrelated like social anxiety, microagressions, and minority stress. We could probably somehow relate it to desire for gender affirming surgery and it's interesting to study, but ultimately it's not relevant to my thesis. With my scales (including demographics), the survey is around 100 questions long. With hers, it's bumped all the way up to 270.
Several trans friends provided feedback on the survey and the biggest complaint was about length. Ideally, some scales should be removed. But, she doesn't want to cut out her variables. And, obviously, the entire thesis is dependent on my scales. When I brought up length, she said she wasn't expecting many responses anyways and that the population would probably care enough to respond to a 270 question survey without compensation :/
I'm also upset about how my PI wants to aim for only 70 responses because of the length of the survey. I'm certain I can recruit a far larger sample since I work with several trans organizations, but the chance lowers the longer the survey is. And, anything less than 200 will be thrown out by everyone - the standards for trans research is just too high.
I'm someone who really values quality over quantity. There's a huge standard to live up to in this field, and I'll be using this data to publish several papers. I don't care if I can only publish one paper, as long as it's a GOOD paper that will be respected in trans healthcare. I don't want to lump together 8 different variables that are completely irrelevant to the thesis, just so my PI and I can publish 6 different papers that ultimately people will dismiss because of a low sample size.
Can someone please give me advice on how I can go about compromising about this? Transferring PIs is probably not an option at this point.
Posted Dec 7, 2025, 4:53 AM UTC