There is an interesting article in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (yeah, go figure) that does a systematic examination of "Randomized Control Trials" (RCT aka a between-subjects design with random assignment to detrmine whether an intervention produces a systematic difference relative to a placebo group) that have nonsignificant results; for the abstract see:
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/303/20/2058?etoc Of 72 RCTs published in December 2006 and available through Medline/PubMed, more than 40% of the articles had "spin" about nonsignificant results in at least 2 sections of the paper (there is a more detailed breakdown in the abstract). That is, even though nonsignificant results were obtained, the authors used: |specific reporting strategies, whatever their motive, to |highlight that the experimental treatment is beneficial, |despite a statistically nonsignificant difference for the |primary outcome, or to distract the reader from statistically |nonsignificant results Back in the day, when I was a young, impressionable researcher, I worked on a psychiatric research project and my attention was captured by the conversation of a couple of junior ressearch psychiatrists while waiting for a research meeting to being. They were discussing the profound wisdom of some senior psychiatric researcher who is alleged to have said "you need to know how to mine the gold out of the sh*t that's produced in research". I admit to not understanding why someone would say this or even think it was a good research strategy at the time but, by the looks of this abstract, some people took the advice to heart. I wonder if one would find similar results in the psychological literature? -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] . --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=2788 or send a blank email to leave-2788-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
