1. Common Methodology Mistakes in Educational Research, Revisited, along with a Primer on Both Effect Sizes and the Bootstrap.
- Author
-
Thompson, Bruce
- Abstract
As an extension of B. Thompson's 1998 invited address to the American Educational Research Association, this paper cites two additional common faux pas in research methodology and explores some research issues for the future. These two errors in methodology are the use of univariate analyses in the presence of multiple outcome variables (with the converse use of univariate analyses in post hoc explorations of detected multivariate effects) and the conversion of intervally scaled predictor variables into nominally scaled data in the service of the "of variance" (OVA) analyses. Among the research issues to receive further attention in the future is the appropriate use of statistical significance tests. The use of the descriptive bootstrap and the various types of effect size from which the researcher should select when characterizing quantitative results are also discussed. The paper concludes with an exploration of the conditions necessary and sufficient for the realization of improved practices in educational research. Three appendixes contain the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences for Windows syntax used to analyze data for three tables. (Contains 16 tables, 15 figures, and 173 references.) (SLD)
- Published
- 1999