Waitress Bella is on TikTok . She shares her beach looks and hauls, like plenty of other influencers. Recently, though, shared a series of TikToks that have a home in our statistics and research methods classes.  Bella had a hypothesis. She suspected that certain hairstyles influenced her customers to tip her more. So Bella tested her hypothesis over a series of within-subject, n = 1 experiments at work ( Bella, 2022a , Bella, 2022b , Bella, 2022c ) This isn't a pre-registered paper with open data, but I think this could be a good discussion piece in a research methods or statistics class. I swear that Kate isn't my burner account. If you really, really wanted to test this hypothesis properly, what would that research look like? 1) What external factors influence tips (day of the week, time of day, etc.)? 2) What factors influence reactions to waitstaff (gender, attractiveness, alcohol)? 3) Would you use a within or between research design to study this (different waitstaff wit...

Michael Hobbes shared a Tweet from Nick Gillespie. That Tweet was about an essay from The Bulwark . That Tweet plays fast and loose with Likert-type scale interpretation. The way Hobbes and his Twitter followers break down the issues with this headline provides a lesson on how to examine suspicious research clickbait that doesn't pass the sniff test. First off, who says "close to one in four"? And why are they evoking the attempt on Salman Rushdie's life, which did not happen on a college campus and is unrelated to high-profile campus protests of controversial speakers?  Hobbes dug into the survey cited in the Bulwark piece. The author of the Bulwark piece interpreted the data by collapsing across response options on a Likert-type response scale. Which can be done responsibly, I think. "Very satisfied" and "satisfied" are both happy customers, right? But this is suspicious. Other Twitter users questioned the question and how it may leave room for i...

 I teach with JASP.  Compared to, say, SPSS, JASP doesn't drain my computer of its processing abilities. But it takes more than a Chromebook to run. And I know that many of my Psych Stats colleagues are teaching with SPSS, which takes way more than a Chromebook to run.  This is troublesome because some of our students have Chromebooks. Or second-hand laptops or very inexpensive laptops that fit their budget and run Word just fine but leave some of our students at a disadvantage regarding their ability to succeed in classes that require more than Word. I bet many of these students are financially responsible for themselves and operating on a limited budget. So let's help those students. I learned about a workaround for this problem from one of the ITS employees at Gannon University. A workaround that may be obvious to some of you but I never knew about. It helped one of my students who had a crap top AND (at the time) a concussion, and she was struggling to keep up with wo...