Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Degrees of Freedom in Planning, Running, Analyzing, and Reporting Psychological Studies: A Checklist to Avoid p-Hacking

2016; Frontiers Media; Volume: 7; Linguagem: Inglês

10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01832

1664-1078

Jelte M. Wicherts, Coosje Lisabet Sterre Veldkamp, Hilde Elisabeth Maria Augusteijn, Marjan Bakker, Robbie C. M. van Aert, Marcel A. L. M. van Assen,

Mental Health Research Topics

The designing, collecting, analyzing, and reporting of psychological studies entail many choices that are often arbitrary. The opportunistic use of these so-called researcher degrees of freedom aimed at obtaining statistically significant results is problematic because it enhances the chances of false positive results and may inflate effect size estimates. In this review article, we present an extensive list of 34 degrees of freedom that researchers have in formulating hypotheses, and in designing, running, analyzing, and reporting of psychological research. The list can be used in research methods education, and as a checklist to assess the quality of preregistrations and to determine the potential for bias due to (arbitrary) choices in unregistered studies.