TY - JOUR
T1 - Degrees of freedom in planning, running, analyzing, and reporting psychological studies
T2 - A checklist to avoid p-hacking
AU - Wicherts, J.M.
AU - Veldkamp, C.L.S.
AU - Augusteijn, H.E.M.
AU - Bakker, M.
AU - van Aert, R.C.M.
AU - van Assen, M.A.L.M.
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - The designing, collecting, analyzing, and reporting of psychological studies entail many choices that are often arbitrary. The opportunistic use of these so-called researcher degrees of freedom aimed at obtaining statistically significant results is problematic because it enhances the chances of false positive results and may inflate effect size estimates. In this review article, we present an extensive list of 34 degrees of freedom that researchers have in formulating hypotheses, and in designing, running, analyzing, and reporting of psychological research. The list can be used in research methods education, and as a checklist to assess the quality of preregistrations and to determine the potential for bias due to (arbitrary) choices in unregistered studies.
AB - The designing, collecting, analyzing, and reporting of psychological studies entail many choices that are often arbitrary. The opportunistic use of these so-called researcher degrees of freedom aimed at obtaining statistically significant results is problematic because it enhances the chances of false positive results and may inflate effect size estimates. In this review article, we present an extensive list of 34 degrees of freedom that researchers have in formulating hypotheses, and in designing, running, analyzing, and reporting of psychological research. The list can be used in research methods education, and as a checklist to assess the quality of preregistrations and to determine the potential for bias due to (arbitrary) choices in unregistered studies.
U2 - 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01832
DO - 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01832
M3 - Article
VL - 7
JO - Frontiers in Psychology
JF - Frontiers in Psychology
SN - 1664-1078
M1 - 1832
ER -