Emil O. W. Kirkegaard blog
Reading over some sibling control studies, BIG TOUGH GUY mentioned this quite wrong study: Meier, S. M., Mors, O., & Parner, E. (2017). Familial confounding of the association between maternal smoking during pregnancy and schizophrenia. American Journal of Psychiatry, 174(2), 187-187. The topic of the study need not interest us, the error is statistical. Results…
Continue ReadingCooper, C. (2018). Psychological testing: theory and practice. Routledge. This is a pretty food good introduction to psychometrics (the science of psychological measurement). There is the now customary dislike for NHST, more focus on effect sizes, mostly equation-free presentation (except when needed). The table of contents gives a good idea of the conceptual space covered:…
Continue ReadingSee 2019 post on introductions to psychology etc. for broader coverage Anon asks me today: What would be the best way to quickly self-teach enough statistics to be able to evaluate academic papers? I have the basic concepts down but I’ve never taken an actual stats class. The glib reply is: l2code. For reals though. But…
Continue ReadingSomeone emails me: Hello Mr. Kirkegaard, This is a question I emailed to Richard Lynn about data in regression analysis in his book Intelligence that did not make sense to me. [Lynn is busy]. I thought maybe you could answer this question since he cannot, which is why I am forwarding the email I sent…
Continue ReadingYep, it’s another comment based on reading too much industrial and organizational psychology! The Schmidt and Hunter approach to meta-analysis, AKA validity generalization theory (VG theory) AKA psychometric meta-analysis (PMA) differs from others in that it explicitly considers data artifacts and biases and tries to correct for them (good introduction paper here, and authors also…
Continue ReadingAnd now for something completely different. Well, not that different. But not the usual things. I’ve been working in human resources/education since February. It’s quite enjoyable work. My job consists of being asked how to examine the effects of our company training program. Ultimately, what we really want is a return on investment (ROI) calculation,…
Continue ReadingMost method people agree that most researchers are bad at statistics, naturally. A typical paper to show this is: Lyu, X. K., Xu, Y., Zhao, X. F., Zuo, X. N., & Hu, C. P. (2020). Beyond psychology: prevalence of p value and confidence interval misinterpretation across different fields. Journal of Pacific Rim Psychology, 14. P…
Continue ReadingPearl, J., & Mackenzie, D. (2018). The book of why: the new science of cause and effect. Basic Books. This is an interesting but annoying book. The basic pattern of the book goes like this: Scientists used to totally not know anything proper about how to do X or think about X. But no worries,…
Continue ReadingA fellow emailed me asking for help on what to start reading to learn psychology and stats. The replication crisis means that most older psychology introductions should be viewed with distrust, and the various new streams in stats means that much of the stuff in stats textbooks, while not wrong, is less than optimal. In…
Continue ReadingThere’s a certain type of person that doesn’t produce any empirical contribution to “Reducing the heredity-environment uncertainty”. Instead, they contribute various theoretical arguments which they take to undermine the empirical data others give. Usually, these people have a background in philosophy or some other theoretical field. A recent example of this pattern is seen on…
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