Paul I read the two links to the Andrew Gelman blog. I don't see that these comments suggests something fundamentally wrong with the field. If fact, I think the blogs suggest a vibrant community of people discussing research findings. Research studies has always been published that have errors, overstate their claims, turn out to not be replicated, etc. That is true in other disciplines as well. I don't think I see anything particularly structurally wrong here. Marie
Marie Helweg-Larsen, Ph.D. Associate Professor l Department of Psychology Kaufman 168 l Dickinson College Phone 717.245.1562 l Fax 717.245.1971 http://users.dickinson.edu/~helwegm/index.html -----Original Message----- From: Paul C Bernhardt [mailto:pcbernha...@frostburg.edu] Sent: Friday, May 31, 2013 7:50 PM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: [tips] Field under siege I am starting to feel that our field is under siege. Worst thing about my feelings is that I think it may be justified. With the several instances of research fraud, the infamous Bem article... and now this. These articles needed a lot of work to be publishable anywhere, much less in Psychological Science. The first one is filled with loose use of causal language, statements of factual knowledge of the participants rather than indicating it was their reported information which preserves the idea that it may or may not be completely accurate. This guy is quite appropriately raking the field over the coals for its publication in Psychological Science. http://andrewgelman.com/2013/05/17/how-can-statisticians-help-psychologists-do-their-research-better/ The second one he trashes is due to the poor attention to methodological deficiencies that are actually revealed by careful examination of the statistical analyses, but that did not get proper play in the paper. More improper use of causal language in an obviously correlation set of studies is also criticized. http://andrewgelman.com/2013/05/29/another-one-of-those-psychological-science-papers/ We need to do better, as a field. If we genuinely want to be a science, we had better start acting like one. Paul --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: helw...@dickinson.edu. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13234.b0e864a6eccfc779c8119f5a4468797f&n=T&l=tips&o=25829 or send a blank email to leave-25829-13234.b0e864a6eccfc779c8119f5a44687...@fsulist.frostburg.edu --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@jab.org. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=25858 or send a blank email to leave-25858-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
