Always Conduct the “Simplest Valid Analysis”

July 10, 2024

This piece was cross-posted on the Transprent Replications blog. A significant and pretty common problem I see when reading papers in social science (and psychology in particular) is that they present a fancy analysis but don’t show the results of what we have named the “Simplest Valid Analysis” – which is the simplest possible way of analyzing the data that is still a valid test of the hypothesis in question. This creates two potentially serious problems that make me less confident in th...

Do The Findings Of A Study Conducted In One Place Generalize To Other Places?

July 19, 2018

Do the results of studies generalize to new situations? For instance, suppose a study is conducted on a technique or intervention (e.g., providing health education to parents) and the study finds it to be effective for a particular outcome (e.g., improving the health of children). When the next study is conducted on (what appears to be) the same intervention and outcome, should we expect that study to ALSO find the intervention to be effective? There are a lot of reasons why it may NOT: ...