Back in the good old days....when I was in graduate school...I specifically being told by my advisor that "effect" could not be used in a title unless it was a clearly causal effect. So this does err on the side of emphasizing causal. Nevertheless, I also heard somewhere from someone (???) that the reason that the APA guidelines reduced the maximum number of words for a title in APA style was to focus on the actual variables in the title and eliminate any suggestion of "effect" in the title to reduce the abuse of the term "effect"
Now, it makes for splashier headlines when your study gets published and people can talk about something BY INFERENCE "causing" something else simply because it is systematically linked with it. Finally, on a similar topic, I woke up this morning to a news story about "risk factors" for Alzheimer's and my immediate thought was, how are these things "risk factors?" Specifically it mentioned hearing loss and sleep apnea. My understanding of a "risk factor" when talking about health research is that these are things that are either set: a family history of ....xyz; or something we can manage such as obesity or smoking. So hearing loss may be associated with Alzheimer's, might predict that some amount of the variance in developing Alzheimer's is accounted for by something like hearing loss. But is the use of the phrase "risk factor" correct in this instance. Again, it seems to be a phrase that is being abused, much like "effect" is being abused. Early morning musings--so they might be mushy. Annette Annette Kujawski Taylor, Ph.D. Professor, Psychological Sciences University of San Diego 5998 Alcala Park San Diego, CA 921210 tay...@sandiego.edu On Tue, Jul 18, 2017 at 10:00 PM, Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) digest <tips@fsulist.frostburg.edu> wrote: > Subject: Opinions needed > From: Dap Louw <lou...@ufs.ac.za> > Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2017 18:27:55 +0000 > Tipsters > > I am well aware that (and often frustrated by) all sorts of buzz words, > concepts, theories, etc become the flavour of the month/year in > organizations, including universities. I would therefore appreciate your > viewpoint on the following, especially as research methodology is not my > field of specialization: > > To what extent can we measure 'effect'? In the last 40 years in > Psychology I've been involved in hundreds of studies on "The effect of > ......... (television on ...; poverty on ....., etc, etc)". BTW, when I > used ' "the effect of" psychology' in Google Scholar search I got 2 460 000 > results. However: > > According to the latest recommendations of our University's Research > Committee we cannot measure effect unless you make use of especially the > longitudinal design. Therefore any title such as "The effect of ......... > (television on ...; poverty on ....., etc, etc)" is unacceptable and should > be replaced by "the perceived effect of ....." or something similar. Is > this a case of methodology or semantics? > > I look forward to hearing from you. It's high time to get the TIPS ball > rolling again! > > Regards from this side of the ocean. > > Dap > > --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@mail-archive.com. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=51065 or send a blank email to leave-51065-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
