In 2020, Netflix released an 8-episode series called "100 Humans" in which 100 (American) humans from a variety of ages and social groups participate in a series of studies. It's a gold mine of examples for critical thinking in research methods. You'll find examples of posttest-only, pretest-posttest designs, HARKing, ethics, and more. Most of the …
Category: Chapter 04; Ethical Guidelines for Psychology Research
Testing a COVID drug: Design flaws and ethical lapses
Photo credit: Alissa Eckert, MS; Dan Higgins, MAMS/CDC Here's a good example of a bad study. It's related to the COVID pandemic. In this story by NPR journalist Vanessa Romo, you can read about a doctor in Texas who claims to be conducting research on the drug hydroxychloroquine, using COVID patients in a nursing home …
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Temperature data as quasi-experiment
Which government-led social distancing measures are effective at stopping the spread of the novel Coronovirus? One company has contributed data to answering this question. A private health technology company, Kinsa sells a "smart thermometer" which links to an app that guides people through what to do if they have a fever. When people use the …
Screen time (again!)
The effect of screen time on well-being is likely to depend on moderators such as what's on the screen, when it's used, and who's using it. Photo: Eric Nathan / Alamy Stock Photo I can't promise this is the last article on screen time research that I will blog about. But this long-form piece by …
Can Probiotics Actually Treat Obesity?
Should you be suspicious of a study conducted by a company that produces probiotics products? Photo: Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo Guest post by Dr. Dina Gohar, University of Michigan Hippocrates, considered to be the Father of Medicine, reportedly said, “all disease begins in the gut. ” It took doctors centuries …
Correlates of stress in police officers
The death of a fellow officer on duty was rated as one of the most stressful events for police officers. Credit: W. Smith/Epa/REX/Shutterstock What happens when people are exposed to very stressful events? A study has investigated this question using a sample of police officers. The study found a correlation between exposure to stressful job events …
How should physicians be scheduled? Ethics of a new study.
Why might it be ethical to assign medical residents to 30 hour shifts, in the name of research? Photo: Shutterstock How many hours in a row should we expect physicians to work in a single shift? Is a 30 hour shift too long? Although residency programs now limit shifts to 16-hours, it used to be …
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Psychology’s Reproducibility Project
Replication is the act of conducting a study again. If the study gets the same result twice (or more), we say that the study's findings are replicable. Chapter 14 in the book describes three types of replications: Direct replication, conceptual replication, and replication-plus-extension. This blog post is about direct replications. In the last few years, …
Fabricated data in the news
Yet another case of fabricated data, this time from political science, is being analyzed in the news lately. Last December, Science published an article showing that certain types of canvassing techniques could dramatically change people's attitudes toward marriage equality. However, the data for the study were apparently fabricated by one of its key authors. Here …
The fallout of an unethical study
July is turning out to be Ethics Month at EverydayResearchMethods blog. Here's a great piece about the damage that was done by a case of data fabrication. In 1998, a physician named Dr. Andrew Wakefield published a study on 12 sample of patients whose autism symptoms, he claimed, had appeared right after receiving the vaccine …