L2 - Social Psyc in Crisis Flashcards
What does QRP stand for?
Questionable research practices
What are some examples of QRP’s?
Questionable research practices umbrellas false positive psychology due to undisclosed flexibility in a researcher’s data collection methods.
Some examples of this include:
i. Choosing DV’s after collection of data.
ii. Use of covariates.
iii. Reporting selective conditions only.
iv. Outlier exclusion/inclusion.
Give an example of a study which used QRP’s to alter results:
Stapel’s (2008) study, “The secret life of emotions” attempted to investigate whether unconscious emotions affected participants without them knowing.
Stapel primed participants using photos to evoke either fear or disgust before measuring a word fragment completion task using related emotional words.
Found even unconscious priming resulted in more words related to fear/disgust.
Three years later it was discovered that Stapel had tampered with results and his job and career were lost.
What were the results of Stapel’s 2008, (later proven false) study of fear/disgust priming on word completion tasks?
Priming with fear or disgust related photos flashed for 120m/s before a word completion task resulted in higher fear related words in the fear condition and higher disgust related words in the disgust condition.
However priming with fear or disgust related photos flashed for only 40m/s before a word completion task appeared to show higher words related to negative affect, rather than specifically fear/disgust.
This study was later proved to be falsified.
Who completed the first power or meta analysis in Psychology?
Jacob Cohen.
Cohen is also responsible for creating the measure of effect size: Cohen’s d.
What are some possible methods to reduce QRP’s in psychological research?
The main way to reduce QRP’s and their effects may be
an open study frame-work, requiring pre-registration of studies to allow for the possibility of direct replication studies.
How would an OSF (Open Study Frame-work) reduce QRP’s?
Having an OSF in psychological research would make it much more difficult for researches to manipulate their studies after data collection and analysis had taken place.
With an open study frame-work, details of the proposed study including: sample size, DV’s, use of covariates, and specifics on intended data analysis methods would ensure researchers adhered to the methods that were first proposed and ultimately reported studies’ true findings, whether positive or not.
