Contemporary issues in the analysis of data: A survey of 551 psychologists


Book: 
Psychological Science
Authors: 
Zuckerman, M., Hodgins, H. S., Zuckerman, A., & Rosenthal, R.
Category: 
Volume: 
4(1)
Pages: 
49-53
Year: 
1993
Abstract: 

We asked active psychological researchers to answer a survey regarding the following data-analytic issues: (a) the effect of reliability on Type I and Type II errors, (b) the interpretation of interaction, (c) contrast analysis, and (d) the role of power and effect size in successful replications. Our 551 participants (a 60% response rate) answered 59% of the questions correctly; 46% accuracy would be expected according to participants' response preferences alone. Accuracy was higher for respondents with higher academic ranks and for questions with "no" as the right answer. It is suggested that although experienced researchers are able to answer difficult but basic data-analytic questions at better than chance levels, there is also a high degree of misunderstanding of some fundamental issues of data analysis.

The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education

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