WELCOME

Researchers often want to be able to answer the questions

May 13, 2019 by Elizabeth Duran

Researchers often want to be able to answer the questions that are directly important in their work, and that is where a replication crisis makes a difference. It’s not just that individual puzzle pieces are low in quality, it’s also that there’s not enough effort to fit those pieces into a coherent picture. "Without an overarching theoretical framework, “empirical programs spawn and grow from personal intuitions and culturally biased folk theories.”

It’s also that there’s not enough effort to fit those pieces into a coherent picture.

Muthukrishna and Henrich argue that the main problem with the replication crisis is that it’s not possible to design a replication process that maximizes the number of questions that the researchers have asking. Rather, they argue, it’s not possible to use the replication process to create new research and better understand the research. In other words, they argue, it’s not possible to design a replication process that maximizes the number of questions that the researchers have asking. In other words, it’s not possible to use the replication process to create new research and better understand the work.

"The more difficult it is to create hypotheses and replicate results, the more difficult it is to do research that maximizes the number of questions a replication process can ask," say Muthukrishna and Henrich. "This is a crucial issue. If we can't have the capacity to create a replication process that maximizes the number of questions, we can't make our research better."

For all the talk of the replication crisis, the biggest, most important, and the most complex challenges of human research, the most crucial and most critical are those that arise from the interactions of a number of key aspects of the study:

a) the methodological quality of the study, particularly if it’s a qualitative study, b) the quality of the results from the study—and these are key to the quality of the replication process,․

These factors—both qualitative and quantitative—can affect the replication process. The authors of this paper acknowledge that the replication crisis is a complex issue. But they acknowledge that there is no good way to minimize the impact of the replication crisis, as long as the quality and the precision of the results do not become a significant source of uncertainty.

In this paper, they provide evidence that many of these factors are at play,․ especially when looking at large, qualitative studies.