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Why Is Replication Important In Psychology

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What Is The Main Purpose Of Replication Studies

Replication

The credibility of scientific studies is established only if it is replicable under similar or closely related conditions. Findings collected from such studies gives greater validity to the originally conducted research. Furthermore, it means that the original study is more likely to be generalized for larger applications and future research scope.

What Are The Types Of Replication Studies

Replication studies are broadly classified as:

  • Exact or Direct replications Direct replication is the repetition of an experimental procedure to the exact degree as possible. It means that exactly same equipment, material, stimuli, design and statistical analysis should be used.
  • Conceptual replications Conceptual replication is when research is conducted by using different methods to repeat the original study. Despite difference in methods, the new data is similar to the original study findings.
  • How Do Scientists Replicate An Experiment

    When conducting a study or experiment, it is essential to have clearly defined operational definitions. In other words, what is the study attempting to measure?

    When replicating earlier researchers, experimenters will follow the same procedures but with a different group of participants. If the researcher obtains the same or similar results in follow-up experiments, it means that the original results are less likely to be a fluke.

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    Boundary Conditions And Limitations

    We consider several conceptual and methodological boundary conditions of our model. One objection to our analysis might invoke doubts about the validity of citations as an indicator of scientific quality. This objection would be based on a misunderstanding of our reliance on citation rates. The core of our model is the assumption that the scientific community shows an uneven distribution of interest in phenomena. Any differentiation between findings, no matter how small, will render the public replication regime more efficient. It is only when there is complete uniformity and all effects are considered equally interesting, that the cost advantage of the public replication regime is eliminated . It follows that our analysis does not hinge on whether or not citation rates are a valid indicator of scientific quality or merit. Even if citations were an error-prone measure of scientific merit, they indubitably are an indicator of attention or interest. An article that has never been cited simply cannot be as interesting to the community as one that has been cited thousands of times, whatever ones personal judgment of its quality may be.

    Fig. 9: Effects of perturbations of the idealized scientific community.

    Historical And Sociological Roots

    BishopBlog: When is a replication not a replication?

    Predictions of an impending crisis in the quality control mechanism of science can be traced back several decades. Derek de Solla Priceâconsidered the father of scientometrics, the quantitative study of scienceâpredicted that science could reach “senility” as a result of its own exponential growth. Some present day literature seems to vindicate this “overflow” prophecy, lamenting the decay in both attention and quality.

    Historian Philip Mirowski offers another reading of the crisis in his 2011 book Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science. In the title, the word is used by Mirowski as a metaphor for the commodification of science. In Mirowski’s analysis, the quality of science collapses when it becomes a commodity being traded in a market. Mirowski argues his case by tracing the decay of science to the decision of major corporations to close their in-house laboratories. They outsourced their work to universities in an effort to reduce costs and increase profits. The corporations subsequently moved their research away from universities to an even cheaper option â Contract Research Organizations.

    Economist Noah Smith suggests that a factor in the crisis has been the overvaluing of research in academia and undervaluing of teaching ability, especially in fields with few major recent discoveries.

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    What Led To The Replication Crisis In Psychology

    Some scientists have warned for years that certain ways of collecting, analyzing, and reporting data, often referred to as questionable research practices, make it more likely that results will appear to be statistically meaningful even though they are not. Flawed study designs and a publication bias that favors confirmatory results are other longtime sources of concern.

    A series of replication projects in the mid-2010s amplified these worries. In one major project, fewer than half of the studies that replicators tried to recreate yielded similar results, suggesting that at least some of the original findings were false positives.

    A variety of findings have come into question following replication attempts, including well-known ones suggesting that certain types of priming, physical poses, and other simple interventions could affect behavior in surprising or beneficial ways. It is important to note that psychology is not alone, however: Other fields, such as cancer research and economics, have faced similar questions about methodological rigor.

    The growing awareness of how research practices can lead to false positives has coincided with extreme instances of willful misrepresentation and falsificationresulting, in some cases, in the removal or resignation of prominent scientists.

    Enormity Of The Current Crisis

    Recently, there has been growing concern as psychological research fails to replicate. To give you an idea of the extent of non-replicability of psychology findings, below are data reported in 2015 by the Open Science Collaboration project, led by University of Virginia psychologist Brian Nosek . Because these findings were reported in the prestigious journal, Science, they received widespread attention from the media. Here are the percentages of research that replicatedselected from several highly prestigious journals:

    Clearly, there is a very large problem when only about 1/3 of the psychological studies in premier journals replicate! It appears that this problem is particularly pronounced for social psychology but even the 53% replication level of cognitive psychology is cause for concern.

    The situation in psychology has grown so worrisome that the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman called on social psychologists to clean up their act . The Nobel laureate spoke bluntly of doubts about the integrity of psychology research, calling the current situation in the field a mess. His missive was pointed primarily at researchers who study social priming, but in light of the non-replication results that have since come out, it might be more aptly directed at the behavioral sciences in general.

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    What Are Reproducibility Robustness And Replicability

    Replication refers to testing the reliability of a prior finding with different data. Robustness refers to testing the reliability of a prior finding using the same data and a different analysis strategy. Reproducibility refers to testing the reliability of a prior finding using the same data and the same analysis strategy . Each of the three notions plays an important role in assessing credibility.

    Confirm Replication And Communicate Results

    The Replication Crisis in Psychology – Philosophical Questions

    Document all processes of your experiment, including methods of measurement, variables, hypotheses, standard or controlled conditions, data collection methods and analysis of the replication results. Communicate your findings with peers to provide new information or confirm results from the replicated experiment. Providing this information may help streamline future replication psychology methods and help other scientists gain deeper insight into topics in psychology.

    Related:

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    Time To Overcome An Industry Bias

    Even the best scientists make mistakes, and replication studies provide a valuable contribution in catching such mistakes before flawed studies get too widely dispersed. No one disputes the need for validation, especially in this climate of highly competitive research that is expected to produce maximum results as quickly as possible.

    However, we are currently trapped in a vicious cycle of prestige-chasing that has to change. The less chance a proposed study has of being published in a prestigious journal, the less likely it is that the study will receive funding. Even if it does receive funding, researchers are unlikely to compete to participate in the study if they donât see a chance of getting it published.

    The days of open access journals and pay-for-print journals that charge article processing fees , have rapidly expanded the number of journals out there. Unless some of them start setting aside space for replication studies, the resources assigned to research validation will continue to decline, and flawed research that cannot be validated will be allowed to persist without challenge or retraction.

    Does Replication Introduce Systematic Variation

    Replication is necessary to introduce systematic variation into an experiment. Replication increases the chances that a rare result leads one to an erroneous conclusion.

    Why is it important to design experiments that can be replicated?

    The replication is so important in science. Common choices that can affect the reliability of results by being made after the experiment has started include when to stop the experiment, how to analyse the data, and which subgroup comparisons to carry out. The replication reduces variability in experimental results.

    Why is repitition important in an experiment?

    The repetition principle in scientific research. The repetition principle is important in scientific research, because the observational indexes are random variables, which require a certain amount of samples to reveal their changing regularity. Subsequently, question is, what are the advantages of replication in an experiment?

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    What Replicates And What Does Not

    Some replications produce evidence consistent with the original studies others do not. Why is that? Knowledge about the correlates and potential causes could help improve interventions to increase replicability. We discuss three overlapping classes of correlates: theoretical maturity, features of the original studies, and features of the replication studies.

    The Replication Crisis In Psychology Has Been Going On For Years Now And Scientists Are Reforming Their Ways

    That replication of the replication study that didn

    The replication crisis in psychology, as it is often called, started around 2010, when a paper using completely accepted experimental methods was published purporting to find evidence that people were capable of perceiving the future, which is impossible. This prompted a reckoning: Common practices like drawing on small samples of college students were found to be insufficient to find true experimental effects.

    Scientists thought if you could find an effect in a small number of people, that effect must be robust. But often, significant results from small samples turn out to be statistical flukes.

    The crisis intensified in 2015 when a group of psychologists, which included Nosek, published a report in Science with evidence of an overarching problem: When 270 psychologists tried to replicate 100 experiments published in top journals, only around 40 percent of the studies held up. The remainder either failed or yielded inconclusive data. And again, the replications that did work showed weaker effects than the original papers. The studies that tended to replicate had more highly significant results compared to the ones that just barely crossed the threshold of significance.

    Another important reason to do replications, Nosek says, is to get better at understanding what types of studies are most likely to replicate, and to sharpen scientists intuitions about what hypotheses are worthy of testing and which are not.

    Nature Human Behavior

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    What Is The Difference Between Repeat And Replicate

    Repeat and replicate measurements are both multiple response measurements taken at the same combination of factor settings but repeat measurements are taken during the same experimental run or consecutive runs, while replicate measurements are taken during identical but different experimental runs, which are often

    Why Should Experiments Be Replicable

    If an experiment is replicable it means that the conduction of the experiment can be done multiple times to obtain data and or results. It is important that experiments be replicated because to basically avoid error in obtaining data. And to make sure a particular set of results arent because of chance or error in measurement or analysis.

    Why must experiments be replicated?

    Experimental replicates are used to detect the degree of variation that is introduced by a particular instance of an experiment. If any given experiment is repeated on a different day it will have slightly different results from the original.

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    Lab Truth Versus Real

    The replicability problem is evident when considering that the nature of psychological phenomena is intertwined with their methodological/measurement demonstrations. Accordingly, self-control prevents people from using profanities in public , but not when they interact with trusted friends in private settings . Field experiments, while important for external validity, tend to compromise internal validity and make the findings of such studies difficult to replicate. Because intervening variables are hard to experimentally control in real-life situations, the measured influence of these variables will not be identical in original and replication studies. The tradeoff between internal and external validity is nothing new but should not be ignored, because it suggests a marked difference between lab truth and real-life truth.

    What If Replication Fails

    Psychological Research: Crash Course Psychology #2

    So what happens if the original results cannot be reproduced? Does that mean that the experimenters conducted bad research or that, even worse, they lied or fabricated their data?

    In many cases, non-replicated research is caused by differences in the participants or in other extraneous variables that might influence the results of an experiment. Sometimes the differences might not be immediately clear, but other researchers might be able to discern which variables could have impacted the results.

    For example, minor differences in things like the way questions are presented, the weather, or even the time of day the study is conducted might have an unexpected impact on the results of an experiment. Researchers might strive to perfectly reproduce the original study, but variations are expected and often impossible to avoid.

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    Perspectives Of Researchers Who Have Studied Replicability

    Several experts who have studied replicability within and across fields of science and engineering provided their perspectives to the committee. Brian Nosek, cofounder and director of the Center for Open Science, said there was not enough information to provide an estimate with any certainty across fields and even within individual fields. In a recent paper discussing scientific progress and problems, Richard Shiffrin, professor of psychology and brain sciences at Indiana University, and colleagues argued that there are no feasible methods to produce a quantitative metric, either across science or within the field to measure the progress of science . Skip Lupia, now serving as head of the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences at the National Science Foundation, said that there is not sufficient information to be able to definitively answer the extent of non-reproducibility and non-replicability, but there is evidence of p-hacking and publication bias , which are problems. Steven Goodman, the codirector of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford University , suggested that the focus ought not be on the rate of non-replication of individual studies, but rather on cumulative evidence provided by all studies and convergence to the truth. He suggested the proper question is How efficient is the scientific enterprise in generating reliable knowledge, what affects that reliability, and how can we improve it?

    Is The Study Of Human Behavior A Science

    Although scientific research is an important method of studying human behavior, not all questions can be answered using scientific approaches. Statements that cannot be objectively measured or objectively determined to be true or false are not within the domain of scientific inquiry. Scientists therefore draw a distinction between values and facts.

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    Which Practices Can Fix The Replication Crisis

    Psychologists have developed an array of strategies to ensure that future findings have greater credibility. These include conducting more replications of emerging findings, relying on larger sample sizes, and leveraging thoroughly tested measures. Another is preregistration, delineating ones hypothesis and study plans before conducting a study. Yet another is Registered Reports, in which journals agree to publish a transparently planned-out study no matter the results.

    Why Psychologists Need To Get Psychology Right

    Nothing Wrong With Me

    Despite the challenges, the work continues. The members of the Psychological Science Accelerator still believe in the value of psychological research, even though and perhaps because the recent history of the replication crisis is upsetting to them.

    Psychology matters, and getting it right matters, because this is the science of the human experience, Chartier says. If you can just marginally improve the way we collect and analyze our data and draw conclusions from them, there are untold future human beings that can benefit from that tiny advance.

    Good science is a gift we give to the future. Today, we have the gift of eclipse predictions from scientists from the past. We dont yet know what specific gifts a more scientifically sound and globally equitable field of psychology could give us. But whatever they might be, they now have the potential to be durable and powerful for the entire world.

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    Why Is Scientific Research Necessary

    Why is it important for the psychologist to study scientific research and research methodology?

    Psychologists and other social scientists regularly propose explanations for human behavior. By knowing the steps of the scientific method, you can better understand the process researchers go through to arrive at conclusions about human behavior.

    Why is research important in developmental psychology?

    The study of developmental psychology is essential to understanding how humans learn, mature and adapt. They conduct research designed to help people reach their full potential for example, studying the difference between learning styles in babies and adults.

    What does scientific research mean and why is it important?

    Research conducted for the purpose of contributing towards science by the systematic collection, interpretation and evaluation of data and that, too, in a planned manner is called scientific research: a researcher is the one who conducts this research.

    Are The Results Of Psychology Experiments Hard To Replicate

    In 2015, a group of 271 researchers published the results of their five-year effort to replicate 100 different experimental studies previously published in three top psychology journals. The replicators worked closely with the original researchers of each study in order to replicate the experiments as closely as possible.

    The results were less than stellar. Of the 100 experiments in question, 61% could not be replicated with the original results. Of the original studies, 97% of the findings were deemed statistically significant. Only 36% of the replicated studies were able to obtain statistically significant results.

    As one might expect, these dismal findings caused quite a stir.

    So why are psychology results so difficult to replicate? Writing for The Guardian, John Ioannidis suggested that there are a number of reasons why this might happen, including competition for research funds and the powerful pressure to obtain significant results. There is little incentive to retest, so many results obtained purely by chance are simply accepted without further research or scrutiny.

    The project authors suggest that there are three potential reasons why the original findings could not be replicated.

    • The original results were a false positive.
    • The replicated results were a false negative.
    • Both studies were correct but differed due to unknown differences in experimental conditions or methodologies.

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