D. Lakens

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Professor Daniël Lakens
Human Technology Interaction
Eindhoven University of Technology

[Some earlier posts by D. Lakens on this topic are at the end of this post]*

This continues Part 1:

4: Most do not offer any alternative at all

At this point, it might be worthwhile to point out that most of the contributions to the special issue do not discuss alternative approaches to p < .05 at all. They discuss general problems with low quality research (Kmetz, 2019), the importance of improving quality control (D. W. Hubbard & Carriquiry, 2019), results blind reviewing (Locascio, 2019), or the role of subjective judgment (Brownstein et al., 2019). There are historical perspectives on how we got to this point (Kennedy-Shaffer, 2019), ideas about how science should work instead, many stressing the importance of replication studies (R. Hubbard et al., 2019; Tong, 2019). Note that Trafimow both recommends replication as an alternative (Trafimow, 2019), but also co-authors a paper stating we should not expect findings to replicate (Amrhein et al., 2019), thereby directly contradicting himself within the same special issue. Others propose not simply giving up on p-values, but on generalizable knowledge (Amrhein et al., 2019). The suggestion is to only report descriptive statistics. Continue reading →