Descriptive vs. inferential cheating

Descriptive vs. inferential cheating

Given the recent and highly publicized scandals involving psychology researchers who cheated, the proliferation of articles on related topics is unsurprising. As an example, Simons et al. (2011) pointed out subtle ways in which researchers can increase their false positive rate above the nominal level of p < 0.05. From my perspective, a major limitation of the literature on cheating has been a ...

Effect Size vs Inferential Statistics

Chapter 14 . Inferential Statistics , Descriptive Statistics and The Analysis Plan

Provided that the data show that a compound is safe, it is the primary efficacy analysis that determines whether the compound is approved. The secondary analyses support, clarify and confirm, but only one prospectively planned efficacy analysis can be primary in support of an effectiveness claim for a given trial. Why should this be so? And how can we design the trial and set up the primary eff...

How Young Children Learn From Examples: Descriptive and Inferential Problems

Three experiments with preschool- and young school-aged children (N = 75 and 53) explored the kinds of relations children detect in samples of instances (descriptive problem) and how they generalize those relations to new instances (inferential problem). Each experiment initially presented a perfect biconditional relation between two features (e.g., all and only frogs are blue). Additional exam...

Mobile Jump Assessment (mJump): A Descriptive and Inferential Study

BACKGROUND Vertical jump tests are used in athletics and rehabilitation to measure physical performance in people of different age ranges and fitness. Jumping ability can be analyzed through different variables, and the most commonly used are fly time and jump height. They can be obtained by a variety of measuring devices, but most are limited to laboratory use only. The current generation of s...