I believe it was a group of 76 people - 36 had dogs with separation anxiety and 40 were okay.
The article can be summed up with this, "It is possible that humans with higher levels of stress do not have a relaxed relationship with their dogs."
This is what stress does and it's not only applicable to the dogs as I am sure friends, family and co-workers would also have less than a relaxed relationship with the individual.
36 who reported behavior problems, and 40 who did not. Veterinary medicine generally has small studies, because there's absolutely no money in veterinary medicine.
The authors note that for most of the variables people are talking about, the groups were pretty balanced. Which isn't surprising given they used snowball sampling for their recruitment - that's good at getting homogeneous groups.
Oops so 70 odd people. That’s still nowhere near reasonable to make the claims they’re making.
Being hard to get a decent sample size isn’t a justification for making unreasonable claims.
A few people have commented on the nature of the samples group (namely that they were homogenous, etc), but that’s not mentioned in the article, and the paper is behind a paywall. If you want a press release for your paper you need to make sure the relevant data is available to people who otherwise only have access to the article.
"If you want a press release for your paper you need to make sure the relevant data is available to people who otherwise only have access to the article." You're assuming the authors of the article have more than a modicum of control over what appears in an unrelated print magazine.
Having been on the end of that: They don't.
Also, 70 subjects is decently well powered for their analysis, which is actually pretty simple. It's not nearly what I'd prefer, but it's just a bunch of Mann-Whitney U tests and chi-squared tests of association.
My wife is a dog breeder. My anecdotal sample size is getting close to the sample size of the study.
In one litter you will get such a large range of personalities even with same parents and being raised the same.
And then there’s such a big range of behaviours between the breeds. For example, weimaraners are predisposed to separation anxiety.
In addition, some owners adopt or rescue dogs who had bad experiences.
With the article behind a paywall, I’m guessing a sample size of 70 is way too small to come up with something insightful. How on earth could they come up with a “negative spiral” from the data. Sounds made up.
Anyway, I’ve stopped judging owners based on the behaviour of their dogs.
