Love: reading about new ideas and clever tests and challenges to old ideas.
Hate: psychologists who do not know their history and do not incorporate
earlier thinking in their theories
Psychologists using IAT and similar contrivances to put-down or label
others--and related arrogance of categorization/measurements
Psychologists going hog-wild with causal language merely because they did
multiple regression or partial correlation exploring one or two so-called third
variables..whoop-de-doo ;-)
Dev. psychologists and others speaking of the "effects of" age, gender,
culture, and other subject factors without considering the many confounds
linked to same.
Using the word "significant" without statistical in front and when no
argument has been given regarding practical impact OR theoretical value.
And I agree with Michael--use of fashionable but complex stat programs
rather than more basic and direct tests of ideas
Finally, I always wish psychologists would have learned to describe and
more directly explore behavior/experience before fitting phenomena to their
research designs.
Now these can be the basis of some new year's resolutions? Gary
Gerald L. (Gary) Peterson, Ph.D.
Professor, Psychology
Saginaw Valley State University
University Center, MI 48710
989-964-4491
[email protected]
>>> Michael Britt <[email protected]> 12/17/2008 10:29 am >>>
After a brief email exchange with Blaine Peden I've decided to
definitely go ahead with an episode I've been planning on the above
topic (although I plan to call it "5 things I hate (and love) about
psychological research"). Here's what I've got so far:
Hate:
1) the stats are often way to complex even for people trained in the
field (my favorite "way out of my league" statistic: the ARIMA -
"AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average"). No wonder our students
skip to the Results section!
2) the positive outcome publication bias
3) often boring to read. We tell students research is driven by
curiosity about human behavior, but none of the excitement (even
interest) is captured when you read a published article
4) significant results perhaps, but small effect sizes (which is often
glanced over)
Love:
1) playing around with the data once you have it all collected.
There's actually a little excitement at that point in the research
2) seeing your name in the final printed article
I wanted to take a suggestion from a Tipster after a post I made a few
months back (about those horses that were so "insightful" they could
train employees to be better workers): I invite anyone to add to my
list (if so inclined) by responding to this post, but this might be
fun: I'd like to share some of your thoughts with my Psych Files
podcast listeners, but instead of me reading your comment, why not
record your comment on my website and I'll play it during the episode?
I have a "Leave a Voice Message!" recorder on my website. Scroll down
and you'll see it on the left side of the page (don't worry - you can
record your message several times until you're happy with it, and it
won't be "published" until I approve it). I'd love to actually hear
your thoughts on this topic (and my listeners too).
Michael
Michael Britt
[email protected]
www.thepsychfiles.com
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