A product of Vahtian
No-one arrives with tidy parameters. You arrive with pressure: a protocol to write, an N to defend, a reviewer’s comment, half-coded pilot interviews, or a nagging doubt about saturation. MethodVahti starts from your situation and helps you build a defensible, COREQ/SRQR-grounded argument. You’re not optimising a number — you’re defending a decision; the models run underneath.
“I’m writing the protocol and need an N I can defend.”
Whatever route you take, the output is the same shape: submission-ready methods text and a COREQ/SRQR-mapped record of every decision — for an ethics application, a protocol, a reviewer-response letter, or a manuscript. Every claim carries its epistemic status (◆ ◇ ○ ◌).
| Section | Standards covered |
|---|---|
| Study profile | SRQR 1–6 · COREQ 1–9 |
| Sampling argument + optimisation | SRQR 13 · COREQ 17 |
| Three-model sample-size comparison | COREQ 17 |
| Fuzzy-set calibration sensitivity | SRQR 5 |
| Epistemic limitations | SRQR 20 · COREQ 31–32 |
| COREQ 32-item checklist | COREQ complete |
| Citation + audit record | Reproducibility |
Download the sample report (PDF) → Try the live simulations →
The sample is illustrative — an IPA study of treatment decision-making in advanced NSCLC. Your report is built from your situation; the simulations let you feel how the models respond before you commit.
Primary ○
Heterogeneity estimated within each dimension, then aggregated across them. This is the number that feeds the sample-size argument.
Diagnostic ◆
A descriptive, per-dimension breakdown — which dimensions actually carry the variation, as a plain unweighted mean.
Diagnostic ○
The full cross-tabulation with a sparsity penalty, so data gaps are visible — never silently driving the result.
Severity weight ≠ observed rate. An outcome weight of 0.90
means near-maximum amplification severity, not "90% disagreement". Defaults are author
hypotheses; teams audit them with pilot data, and every change is timestamped in the report. Curious how
the models move? Open the explorer →
Free while in beta
Individual pricing arrives at 1.0. Beta is the time to use it free and tell us what's wrong with it.
Start from your situation →Paid — per research project
Individuals start free from any situation and the planning explorer. The institutional project licence and guided drafting are how the work gets funded. Developers: the Apache-2.0 core is on GitHub.
We don't hide that the primary heterogeneity score is an author hypothesis (○) — Vahtian's construction, not externally validated. We are testing it against open-access qualitative datasets and published meta-syntheses, and we will publish the validation protocol and results openly. Until that work lands, treat the score as decision support, not ground truth. Read the validation plan →
Honest limits: MethodVahti does not infer causality, does not validate study quality, and does not replace researcher judgment. The number is a synthesis you defend — not a verdict it issues.