Category: 1.3 Research Methods
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Anecdotal evidence on the method wars
On a whim, I asked my Twitterverse (which includes a fair number of computer scientists) what they think about the following question: When peer-reviewing somebody else’s work submitted for publication, what should you do if you find that the authors have a different belief than you about what can be known? There were only 11…
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Alternative definition of theoretical saturation in qualitative research
Theoretical Saturation: The mental state of a researcher wanting to finish up the work and go home for the holidays.
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Evaluation of theories vs. validation of hypotheses
Research should be presented with appropriate choice of words to the world. So it bugs me if researchers, maybe unknowingly, overreach and call the evaluation of a theory a validation thereof. I don’t think you can ever fully validate a theory, you can only validate individual hypotheses. The following figure shows how I think key…
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Is exploratory data analysis bad?
Last weekend, I ventured into unchartered territory (for me) and attended the Berliner Methodentreffen, a research conference mostly frequented by social scientists. I participated in a workshop on mixed methods, where the presenter discussed different models of mixing methods with each other (“Methodenpluralität” in German). She omitted one model that I thought is often used:…
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We may not know what we are doing…
From my excursion into qualitative research land (the aforementioned Berliner Methodentreffen) I took away some rather confusing impressions about the variety of what people consider science. I’m well aware of different philosophies of science (from positivism to radical constructivism) and their impact on research methodology (from controlled experiments to action research, ethnographies, etc.) I did…
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The ASA’s statement on p-values: context, process, and purpose
The American Statistical Associations’s answer to “statistical techniques for testing hypotheses…have more flaws than Facebook’s privacy policies.” is is now available for free.