Gasparikova-Krasnec and Ging found that researchers were generally cooperative in providing information needed for replications. A month's wait was normally all that was required. Researchers typically realize that double-checking surprising results is important to science. A failed replication may have a stimulating effect on a field of research. Replication failures inspire new studies to figure out why an attempt to use the "same" procedures led to different results.
A fine-grained analysis of the experimental procedures may reveal some key details that were different, when comparing the original study to the replication.
If a replication fails, but the original researchers believe their original finding is correct, they will suggest ways to tighten up controls or other procedures to improve the chances of a successful replication. They hope the results will come back if another replication is attempted with improved techniques.
On some occasions, replication failures continue. False claims—including those that start as honest mistakes—produce a distinctive pattern during successive attempts at replication: the effects get smaller and smaller as more replications are conducted. This happened, for example, in the case of cold fusion: a desktop apparatus was said to produce fusion energy. In psychology, it happened with cardiac conditioning : claims that heart rates could be altered directly through conditioning procedures.
Diminishing effects with repeated replications occur not because an actual effect is disappearing, but because scientists are eliminating errors with better controls, as they make additional attempts at replication.
A solid, scientific finding will gain more support as people continue to test it. A false lead or quack science claim will become less solid as people continue to test it. Gasparikova-Krasnec, M. Experimental replication and professional cooperation. American Psychologist, 41 , Prev page Page top Chapter Contents Next page. Don't see what you need?
Socialization of emotion relates to social competence. Individuals who experienced traumatic events are more less likely to seek social support then in turn leads to increased vulnerability to posttraumatic stress disorder.
Writing good operational definitions is about writing, re-writing, re-writing and then repeating this process.
Travis Dixon. Comments 1. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. When conducting a study or experiment , it is essential to have clearly defined operational definitions. In other words, what is the study attempting to measure?
When replicating earlier researchers, experimenters will follow the same procedures but with a different group of participants. So what happens if the original results cannot be reproduced? Does that mean that the experimenters conducted bad research or that, even worse, they lied or fabricated their data? In many cases, non-replicated research is caused by differences in the participants or in other extraneous variables that might influence the results of an experiment.
For example, minor differences in things like the way questions are presented, the weather, or even the time of day the study is conducted might have an unexpected impact on the results of an experiment. Researchers might strive to perfectly reproduce the original study, but variations are expected and often impossible to avoid.
In , a group of researchers published the results of their five-year effort to replicate different experimental studies previously published in three top psychology journals.
The results were less than stellar. As one might expect, these dismal findings caused quite a stir. So why are psychology results so difficult to replicate? Writing for The Guardian , John Ioannidis suggested that there are a number of reasons why this might happen, including competition for research funds and the powerful pressure to obtain significant results.
There is little incentive to retest, so many results obtained purely by chance are simply accepted without further research or scrutiny. The project authors suggest that there are three potential reasons why the original findings could not be replicated.
The Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman has suggested that because published studies are often too vague in describing methods used, replications should involve the authors of the original studies in order to more carefully mirror the methods and procedures used in the original research.
Remember there are many ways to write an operational definition. You know you have written an effective one if another researcher could pick it up and create a very similar variable based on your definition. Again, see if you can come up with an operational definition of this variable.
This is a little tricky because you will need to be specific about what an effective treatment is as well as what social anxiety is. Here are some things to consider when writing your definition:.
Again, there is no one right way to write this operational definition. If someone else could recreate the study using your definition it is probably an effective one. Here as one example of how you could operationalize the variable: social anxiety was defined as meeting the DSM-5 criteria for social anxiety and the effectiveness of treatment was defined as the reduction of social anxiety symptoms over the 10 week treatment period.
Final Definition: Take your definition for variable one and your definition for variable two and write them in a clear and succinct way. It is alright for your definition to be more than one sentence.
The first reason was mentioned earlier in the post when reading research others should be able to assess the validity of the research. That is, did the researchers measure what they intended to measure? The next reason it is important to have an operational definition is for the sake of replicability. Research should be designed so that if someone else wanted to replicate it they could. By replicating research and getting the same findings we validate the findings.
It is impossible to recreate a study if we are unsure about how they defined or measured the variables. Another reason we need operational definitions is so that we can understand how generalizable the findings are. In research, we want to know that the findings are true not just for a small sample of people. We hope to get findings that generalize to the whole population.
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