New paper "Lack of theory building and testing impedes progress in the factor and network literature" is in press at Psych Inquiry. This took a while to write—the first draft dates back to 2016.
The most exciting aspect is that Psych Inquiry will publish many critical commentaries, including from the very people whose work inspired me to write the paper in the first place. Some of them, incl. @IrisVanRooij & @psmaldino, are even listed in the ack section of the paper.
Here is Iris' preprint, together with @giosuebaggio:
What do y'all think about APS' decision to offer 15min flash talks (1 person) rather than symposia in 2021 virtual conference? Bit sad that (online) panel discussions, symposia followed by discussions, etc are skipped. Always found such interactions btw folks most engaging.
But have no experience in conference orga, so I'm sure there are good reasons.
To me, looks like youtube would do a better job because 1) youtube comes without conference fee, and 2) presentations would be #openaccess rather than behind APS paywall.
What am I missing? Thx!
In case all talks open, there is genuine value to participate in APS of course ($ then is for talks to be organized, vetted, grouped, etc).
In case talks paywalled, curious how that can be policed (can hardly forbid folks to upload talks into general OSF repository)
Our paper on measuring outcomes that matter to depressed patients, caregivers, & healthcare professionals is out, led by the brilliant 🔥@ChevanceAstrid🔥.
Details in 🧵below. If you RT only one of my tweets this year, make it this one.
1/ Clinical studies on depression assess symptoms (e.g. sad mood), but there are no proper standards on what symptoms to measure. A recent meta-analysis on psychotherapeutic interventions (200 studies) identified 33 different outcomes used.
2/ Further, symptoms are not a good proxy for how people are doing; e.g. recovery of functioning often lags half a year behind symptom recovery. Finally, it's 2020, yet it is unclear what outcomes we should measure to fully capture people's lived experiences with depression.
However, standardization only helps us compare samples if measures are what we called "measurement invariant", i.e. if they measure the same thing across samples. I am not fully convinced the chosen scales do that.
Which leads me to the biggest ⛔️ of this decision:
Many good reasons to choose these particular scales, such as brevity, but one of the most important reasons from a measurement perspective is validity evidence: do they measure what they claim to measure. And I'm not convinced this is the case. Table below by @JkayFlake 2017.
For those who cannot join my talk on lack of theory in psychology today (2pm CEST, stream pmltalks.nl), here a summary in 6 comics, adapted from the brilliant original by @MrLovenstein.
2/6 Adapted to fit the talk, which is about mismatch between data and theory.
3/6
With most psychological theories, the most benign situation we can find ourselves in is one where we acknowledge that our data are not actually informative about our theory.
In this thread, I summarize 6 preprints on theory in psychology, 3 of which came online in the last week.
🧵
1) Denny Borsboom @rogierK et al. on the Theory Construction Methodology. The authors provide a practical framework for theory formation in psychology, using the example of mutualism.
2) @IrisVanRooij & @giosuebaggio with their new preprint entitled "Theory before the test: How to build high-verisimilitude explanatory theories in psychological science".
The authors discuss how theoretical analyses can endow theories with plausibility.
1/ Your @APA membership fees at work, ladies & gentlemen.
While APA was once committed to distributing scientific information, it has become a gatekeeper to withholding scientific information from the public.
Time to stop reviewing for APA journals.
2/ And I'm not making a legal case: of course they can sick lawyers on us. I'm making the case that a legitimate scientific organization should be happy if folks share work—it's free advertisement. Going after people who *share their own work online* proves this is just about $$$
3/ If you're an APA member, please ask yourself if you're happy how APA spends your membership fees.
@jayvanbavel started a petition about this a few months back, in case you are interested: