Conveners
Symposium: New developments in psychological epistemology and methodology: Perspectivity
- Barbara Hanfstingl (IUS)
Description
Recent problems with validity and reproducibility of psychological findings have led to various proposed solutions for dealing with these inconsistencies. Although most approaches focus on either epistemological or methodological solutions, researchers agree that we can only overcome these challenges by focusing on both. This symposium shows how both levels together shed light on an underappreciated topic: Perspectivity, a rarely discussed issue within research methods. Hanfstingl introduces perspective as possible new quality criterion in research. Tran and colleagues put the perspective on the between-study level instead on intercorrelation matrices, enhancing the potential of mediation analysis in multilevel meta-analysis. Pietschnig and colleagues show how implicit perspective-taking lead to higher decline effects in meta-analyses. Edelsbrunner reports how independent analysts using the same dataset and hypotheses come to different findings and conclusions. Vilsmeier and colleagues introduce novel metrics for evaluating outcomes of replication studies, based on combinatorial meta-analysis (i.e., an all-possible-subsets perspective of research outcomes).
Objectivity as the counterpart of subjectivity is described as one of the most important criteria for achieving sound scientific results. Nevertheless, in psychological science, objectivity has been criticized because psychological processes are not one hundred percent observable or unambiguously interpretable by third parties. Strictly speaking, objectivity can only be assumed if one speaks...
Currently available methods for mediation analysis in meta-analysis are based on structural equation modeling (MASEM) and require the intercorrelation matrix between causal factor(s), mediator(s), and outcome(s) within the primary studies to be known. This may severely limit the application of this method. Here, we present an alternative method whose perspective lies instead on the...
Effect inflation and non-reproducibility of exploratory effects plague empirical sciences in general and Psychological Science in particular. It has been argued, that the resulting biases should lead to a larger prevalence of declining effects over time compared to increasing effects, regardless of the investigated research question. These expectations are supported by evidence about...
In the wake of the 2010s replicability debates, current research witnesses unprecedented amounts of replication studies and theorizing about these. Numerous replication metrics exist, but no consensus about what constitutes replication success/failure. As one-to-many (repeated) replication designs increasingly are the norm, we utilize a combinatorial (all-subsets) meta-analysis (CMA)...
