A couple of years ago, Brian Nosek and colleagues re-ran 100 psychological studies published in top journals during 2008 (source). The question was: will the results replicate? It turns out that’s a nontrivial question. Sure, you might consider that any study where the p-value fell above 0.05 is a study where the effect was not … [Read more…]
When I was an undergrad, I heard how Raymond Cattell (if memory serves me well) plastered his entire office, ceiling included, with papers on which he calculated the factor analysis involved in his theory of 16 basic personality traits. Hundreds of questionnaires with many items, maths to pull out the common variance and reduce the … [Read more…]
Scientific methods and their associated research questions form a variety of fits. Take the reproducibility crisis in behavioural psychology. In social psychology the crisis is quite prominent, with textbook findings being actively questioned. In cognitive psychology (inflated effect sizes notwithstanding) there is less of a feeling of crisis, and yet, the two fields use similar … [Read more…]
There are gasps of indignation when academics hear that pharmaceutical industry doesn’t trust academic research all that much. We think of the big pharma people as the bad guys, the conscience-free predators that prioritise profit over our health and wellbeing. Academics, on the other hand, care about the truth. They don’t aim to get rich, … [Read more…]
Discussions about scientific reproducibility are often rather bleak. We hear that our results are unreliable, that our methods are – and always have been – weak, that our ways need to change but that this might not be the best individual strategy for career advancement. And even if you want to work transparently and reproducibly, … [Read more…]
How many times have you read a research paper only to say, I don’t really believe this finding. It’s a regular occurrence, isn’t it? There is just something about the evidence that isn’t strong enough despite statistical significance, something about your theoretical knowledge that makes this finding fit rather badly. You perform a calculation in … [Read more…]
There are many things to take care of in empirical research. The research design, programming the experiment, piloting, gathering a decent pool of participants, giving them clear instructions, handling complex technical equipment, analysing the data, communicating the findings… Every step of the way, a researcher can make this process run more or less smoothly. But … [Read more…]
It was when Kate Button started her PhD, that she began to appreciate the disconnect between the methods teaching she had prior to the PhD, and the knowledge she needed for actual research. Her early statistics lessons were more about determining which line to read in the SPSS output than about the inferential process. Little … [Read more…]
Say that you are new to research. You’ve read all the textbooks, passed all your exams, and are now beginning to perform empirical investigations. Everyone who has stepped into the lab like this is familiar with the explosion of new elements to master, things that seemed straightforward until you sat down to do them yourself. … [Read more…]
They ride in at dawn while the world quietly slumbers, cocooned in innocence, unsuspecting of the storm that is already under way. Immensely powerful, they gallop in bringing chaos. They are the four horsemen of the reproducibility apocalypse: HARKing, low power, p-hacking and publication bias. Who will resist and who will succumb? Who will be … [Read more…]