Skip to main content

Changes in standards for data reporting in psychology journals

Two prominent psychology journals are changing their standards for publication in order to address several long-standing debates in statistics (p-values v. effect sizes and point estimates of the mean v. confidence intervals).

Here are the details for changes that the Association for Psychological Science is creating for their gold-standard publication, Psychological Science, in order to improve the transparency in data reporting.

Some of the big changes include mandatory reporting of effect sizes, confidence intervals, and inclusion of any scales or measures that were non-significant. This might be useful in class when describing why p-values and means are imperfect, the old p-value v. effect size debate, and how one can bend the truth with statistics via research methodology (and glossing over/completely neglecting N.S. findings). These examples are also useful in demonstrating to your students that these issues we discuss in class have real world ramifications and aren't being taken lightly by research scientists.

Additionally, the Society of Personality and Social Psychology is implementing similar changes in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, as described here. SPSP is even going a step further and demanding open sharing of any data being considered for publication, as described here, and also asking authors to address issues of sample size/power.


Comments

  1. You are AWESOME! I don't know why I've never been on your website before now but I am glad Google just told me what I was missing :) I hope all is well with you and family!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Cindaroo! I hope that you can use material from this blog for your new position (congrats!). The family is good...today is the first day of SP14 so we are trying to get out of Winter Break mode and back into teaching/grading/advising/writing/etc. mode.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ways to use funny meme scales in your stats classes

Have you ever heard of the theory that there are multiple people worldwide thinking about the same novel thing at the same time? It is the multiple discovery hypothesis of invention . Like, multiple great minds around the world were working on calculus at the same time. Well, I think a bunch of super-duper psychology professors were all thinking about scale memes and pedagogy at the same time. Clearly, this is just as impressive as calculus. Who were some of these great minds? 1) Dr.  Molly Metz maintains a curated list of hilarious "How you doing?" scales.  2) Dr. Esther Lindenström posted about using these scales as student check-ins. 3) I was working on a blog post about using such scales to teach the basics of variables.  So, I decided to create a post about three ways to use these scales in your stats classes:  1) Teaching the basics of variables. 2) Nominal vs. ordinal scales.  3) Daily check-in with your students.  1. Teach your students the basics...

Using pulse rates to determine the scariest of scary movies

  The Science of Scare project, conducted by MoneySuperMarket.com, recorded heart rates in participants watching fifty horror movies to determine the scariest of scary movies. Below is a screenshot of the original variables and data for 12 of the 50 movies provided by MoneySuperMarket.com: https://www.moneysupermarket.com/broadband/features/science-of-scare/ https://www.moneysupermarket.com/broadband/features/science-of-scare/ Here is my version of the data in Excel format . It includes the original data plus four additional columns (so you can run more analyses on the data): -Year of Release -Rotten Tomato rating -Does this movie have a sequel (yes or no)? -Is this movie a sequel (yes or no)? Here are some ways you could use this in class: 1. Correlation : Rotten Tomato rating does not correlate with the overall scare score ( r = 0.13, p = 0.36).   2. Within-subject research design : Baseline, average, and maximum heart rates are reported for each film.   3. ...

If your students get the joke, they get statistics.

Gleaned from multiple sources (FB, Pinterest, Twitter, none of these belong to me, etc.). Remember, if your students can explain why a stats funny is funny, they are demonstrating statistical knowledge. I like to ask students to explain the humor in such examples for extra credit points (see below for an example from my FA14 final exam). Using xkcd.com for bonus points/assessing if students understand that correlation =/= causation What are the numerical thresholds for probability?  How does this refer to alpha? What type of error is being described, Type I or Type II? What measure of central tendency is being described? Dilbert: http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Kill%20Anyone Sampling, CLT http://foulmouthedbaker.com/2013/10/03/graphs-belong-on-cakes/ Because control vs. sample, standard deviations, normal curves. Also,"skewed" pun. If you go to the original website , the story behind this cakes has to do w...