Part Five: Overall Concepts As you have seen, the concepts of power, alpha, and beta are important determinants of the sample size that need to be considered when designing a study. But not all investigators think about this aspect of study design before starting their experiments or observational studies, and they could end up with a study that has more subjects than actually needed, or too few. What would be the negative consequences of having a sample size that is larger than required to achieve adequate power? What would be the negative consequences of having a study where the sample size is too small