The Society for Personality and Social Psychology has thus far done very little to address concerns about the transparency and replicability of the research that is published in its journals. It is time for a change in journal policies.
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Experiential measures of subjective well-being are often proposed as alternatives to global self-reports, alternatives that address many threats to validity that global reports have. However, experiential measures may have their own problems that go overlooked because their face validity is so high. In this post, I discuss some of the concerns I have about these measures.
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The limitations of global, self-report measures of happiness are obvious. But sometimes, researchers fail to ask whether the alternative measures that have been proposed to address these limitations come with their own psychometric challenges. In this post, I describe a recent paper that compares two experiential measures of well-being: the Day Reconstruction Method and the Experience Sampling Method. This comparison raises some concerns about experiential approaches.
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R/Exams is a great tool for creating multiple choice exams using R; but it takes some work to get it to do exactly what you want. In this post I describe the modifications to the default options that I made to get R/Exams to print multiple forms of my multiple-choice Intro Psych exams.
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We all know that HARKing (hypothesizing after results are known) is bad, but can similar problems arise even before the a study is conducted? Sometimes it seems that the very act of proposing a replication study makes original authors think differently about their original work.
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In honor of International Day of Happiness, I’m posting my SPSP talk from a few weeks ago, where I discuss happiness research during the replication crisis. I talk about some good things about happiness research, and also some things that could be improved. But more importantly, I brag about my seventh grade awards, talk about the type of happiness research that I’m most skeptical about, praise some data thugs, and tell the story of how we became replication bullies.
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Are there areas within psychology that don’t currently have a problem with replicability? Should certain subdisciplines of psychology be exempt from new policies designed to improve the rigor, replicability, and reproducibility of psychological research? I argue that at the very least we don’t know yet, but that the answer to both questions is likely to be ‘no’.
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