Someone writes: After listening to your EconTalk episode a few weeks ago, I have a question about interpreting treatment effect magnitudes, effect sizes, SDs, etc. I studied Econ/Math undergrad and worked at a social science research institution in health policy as a research assistant, so I have a good amount of background. At the institution […] The post Problems with the jargon “statistically significant” and “clinically significant” appeared first on…
Joachim Krueger writes: As many of us rely (in part) on p values when trying to make sense of the data, I am sending a link to a paper Patrick Heck and I published in Frontiers in Psychology. The goal of this work is not to fan the flames of the already overheated debate, but […] The post Ride a Crooked Mile appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and…
[silly cartoon found by googling *cat burglar*] Torbjørn Skardhamar, Mikko Aaltonen, and I wrote this article to appear in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology: Simple calculations seem to show that larger studies should have higher statistical power, but empirical meta-analyses of published work in criminology have found zero or weak correlations between sample size and […] The post Criminology corner: Type M error might explain Weisburd’s Paradox appeared first on…
I received the following email from psychology researcher Zoltan Kekecs: I would like to ask you to participate in the establishment of the expert consensus design of a large scale fully transparent replication of Bem’s (2011) ‘Feeling the future’ Experiment 1. Our initiative is called the ‘Transparent Psi Project’. [https://osf.io/jk2zf/wiki/home/] Our aim is to develop […] The post Why I’m not participating in the Transparent Psi Project appeared first on…
Jonathan Falk points us to this article by Kewei Hou, Chen Xue, and Lu Zhang, who write: In retrospect, the anomalies literature is a prime target for p-hacking. First, for decades, the literature is purely empirical in nature, with little theoretical guidance. Second, with trillions of dollars invested in anomalies-based strategies in the U.S.market alone, […] The post Financial anomalies are contingent on being unknown appeared first on Statistical Modeling,…
Someone pointed me to this post by Nick Brown discussing a recent article by John Carlisle regarding scientific misconduct. Here’s Brown: [Carlisle] claims that he has found statistical evidence that a surprisingly high proportion of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) contain data patterns that cannot have arisen by chance. . . . the implication is that […] The post “Bombshell” statistical evidence for research misconduct, and what to do about it?…
This came up in a research discussion the other day. Someone had produced some estimates, and there was a question: where are the conf intervals. I said that if you have replication and you graph the estimates that were produced, then you don’t really need conf intervals (or, for that matter, p-values). The idea is […] The post No conf intervals? No problem (if you got replication). appeared first on…
Four years ago, in a post entitled, “How can statisticians help psychologists do their research better?”, I gave the following recommendations to researchers: – Analyze all your data. – Present all your comparisons. – Make your data public. And, for journal editors, I wrote, “if a paper is nothing special, you don’t have to publish […] The post How has my advice to psychology researchers changed since 2013? appeared first…
After this discussion, I pointed Ryan Giordano, Tamara Broderick, and Michael Jordan to Figure 4 of this paper with Bois and Jiang as an example of “static sensitivity analysis.” I’ve never really followed up on this idea but I think it could be useful for many problems. Giordano replied: Here’s a copy of Basu’s robustness […] The post Static sensitivity analysis appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social…
Doug Puett writes: I am a 2012 QMSS [Columbia University Quantitative Methods in Social Sciences] grad who is currently trying to build a Data Science/Quantitative UX team, and was hoping for some advice. I am finding myself having a hard time finding people who are really interested in understanding people and who especially are excited […] The post This company wants to hire people who can program in R or…
