Blog

Method sections in academic (social psychology) papers usually consist of the following sections: Participants, Design, Procedure, and Materials. They also tend to be presented in this order. But is this the right order? I don't think so.

In a recent tweet I asked the question why we use n - 1 to calculate the variance of a sample. Many people contributed an answer, but many of them were of the type I feared. Most consisted of some statistical jargon that confuses me more, rather than less. Other responses were very useful, though, so I recommend checking out the replies to the tweet. In this post, I will try to describe my favorite way of looking at the issue.

This is Part 1 of a series of blog posts on how to understand regression. The goal is to develop an intuitive understanding of the different components of regression. In this first post, we figure out where the estimate of an intercept-only regression model comes from.

A curious thing happened in the field of social psychology: Social psychologists finally realized that statistical power is important. Unfortunately, they then skipped the step of figuring out how to do them correctly. Here I list some papers on power analyses that I hope help in improving the way we do them.