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Critiquing Psychiatric Diagnosis
I came across this great post at the Mind Hacks blog by Vaughan Bell, which is about how we talk about psychiatric diseases, their diagnosis and criticising their nature. Debating the validity of diagnoses is a good thing. In fact, it’s essential we do it. Lots of DSM diagnoses, as I’ve argued before, poorly predict […]
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Stop the “Flipping”
I came across this interesting article at The Thesis Whisperer blog. It starts with the hypothesis being an academic is similar to “running a small, not very profitable business”. This is mainly down to two problems: Problem one: There are a lot of opportunities that could turn into nothing, so it’s best to say yes […]
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New Preprint: A Bayes Factor for Replications of ANOVA Results
Already some weeks ago I have finished up some thoughts for a Replication Bayes factor for ANOVA contexts, which resulted in a manuscript that is available as pre-print at arXiv. The theoretical foundation was laid out before by Verhagen & Wagenmakers (2014) and my manuscript is mainly an extension of their approach. We have another paper […]
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New Paper: Impulsivity and Completion Time in Online Questionnaires
I’ve got my first first-author-paper published in Personality and Individual Differences. The paper is titled “Reliability and completion speed in online questionnaires under consideration of personality” (doi:10.1016/j.paid.2017.02.015) and was written together with Lina and Christian.
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Research is messy: Two cases of pre-registrations
Pre-registrations are becoming increasingly important for studies in psychological research. This is a much needed change since part of the “replication crisis” has to do with too much flexibility in data analysis and interpretation (p-hacking, HARK’ing and the like). Pre-registering a study with planned sample size and planned analyses allows other researchers to understand what […]
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How statistics lost their power – and why we should fear what comes next
This is an interesting article from The Guardian on “post-truth” politics, where statistics and “experts” are frowned upon by some groups. William Davies shows how statistics in the political debate have evolved from the 17th century until today, where statistics are not regarded as an objective approach to reality anymore but as an arrogant and […]
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Predictions for Presidential Elections Weren’t That Bad
Nathan Silver’s FiveThirtyEight has had an excellent coverage of the US Presidential Elections with some great analytical pieces and very interesting insights in their models. Each and every poll predicted Hillary Clinton to win the election and FiveThirtyEight was no exception to that. Consequently, there was a lot of discussion on pollsters, their methods and […]
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New Paper: Reliability Estimates for Three Factor Score Estimators
Just a short post on a new paper that is available from our department. If you happen to have calculated factor score estimators after factor analysis, e.g. using Thurstone’s Regression Estimators, you might be interested in the reliability of the resulting scores. Our paper explains how to do this, compares the reliability of three different factor […]
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Confidence Intervals for Noncentrality Parameters
In recent years, it has become a notion to not only report point estimates of effect sizes, but also confidence intervals for said effect sizes. I have created a small R script to calculate the bounds of such a confidence interval in the case of t- and F-distributions.
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Differences in Pollster Predictions
The New York Times published an interesting piece on the differences between pollsters’ predictions. All five predictions used the same data set, so sampling differences are not of concern. Still, there was a difference of up to 5% between the predictions.