It could probably have been resolved decades ago, and definitely within the last 10 years with genomic data, yet it is still not. Why? Essentially, it’s because of bias in academia. It begins early: data access, then there’s authors’ own publication bias, then finally editorial and reviewing bias (all caused by lack of political/belief diversity […]
Given enough motivation, QRPs, biased reviewing and time, one can build an entire literature of studies proving anything. There’s plenty of all of these to prove left-wing ideological beliefs (and libertarian in economics). However, it is much harder to QRP large N datasets to give preferred results. So, what do large scale studies show about […]
I saw this paper at random: The consequences of heavy alcohol use remain a serious public health problem. Consistent evidence has demonstrated that both genetic and social influences contribute to alcohol use. Research on gene-environment interaction (GxE) has also demonstrated that these social and genetic influences do not act independently. Instead, certain environmental contexts may […]
I am watching Brian Boutwell’s (Twitter, RG) talk at a recent conference and this got me thinking. What are we measuring? As far as I know, there are typically two outcome variables used in criminological studies: Official records convictions. Self-reported criminal or anti-social behavior. But exactly what trait are we trying to measure? It seems […]
When one has a continuous variable and then cuts it into bins (discretization) and correlates it with some other variable, the observed correlation is biased downwards to some extent. The extent depends on the cut-off value(s) used and the number of bins. Normally, one would use polychoric-type methods (better called latent correlation estimation methods) to […]
I’ve always considered myself a very rational and fairly unbiased person. Being aware of the general tendency for people to overestimate themselves (see also visualization of the Dunning-Kruger effect), this of course reduces my confidence in my own estimates of these. So what better to do than take some actual tests? I have previously taken […]
A person on ResearchGate asked the following question: How can I correlate ordinal variables (attitude Likert scale) with continuous ratio data (years of experience)? Currently, I am working on my dissertation which explores learning organisation characteristics at HEIs. One of the predictor demographic variables is the indication of the years of experience. Respondents were asked […]