Methods, Meta-Science, and Mentorship

All students, regardless of thematic workstream, will benefit from a dedicated series of additional events on “Methods, Meta-Science, and Mentorship”. Coordinated by Professor Roger Giner-Sorolla, an influential voice in the Open Science community and a strong advocate for transparency and improved reporting in scientific research, these sessions will introduce students to key issues in the field and help guide their group research projects.

Students will benefit from plenary session on Open Science, alongside a variety of parallel workshops on advanced research methods and data analysis techniques.

Plenary Session on Open Science

Presentation 1: Problems of Evidence (Single Study). This session will describe, succinctly, the “problem of evidence” that hinged on the p-value and reporting practices and brought social psychology’s dominant methods into question in the terrible year 2011. It will review the various measures that have been taken and proposed to rectify this problem: What are they? How widely implemented? What are some of their downsides and problems? What is their future? Thus, in this session students can expect to cover: increased importance of theory; “new statistics” beyond the p-value; statistical power; improved reporting standards, including open data and materials; and the increased importance of measurement validity and reliability.

Presentation 2: Problems of Evidence (Literature-Wide). From the previous presentation, it will be clear that making correct statistical inferences in any given study depends on transparency of the knowledge space in which tests have been conducted. At the same time, making correct inferences about a group of studies, or a whole literature, requires transparency at a larger scale. Here, in the same format as the first presentation, this session will discuss techniques that have been implemented to reduce publication bias and increase the quality of inference across multiple studies including: tolerance of nonsignificant outcomes; preregistration; registered reports; and replication.

Presentation 3: Problems of Relevance and Economics. Perhaps less successful in implementation, but no less important, are problems that have been noted across the decades about the cultural limitations of our knowledge base in social psychology. Clearly, there is a concentric bias of knowledge and prestige centred on the USA and with Global South nations and cultures at the periphery. Also periodically lamented, but with little will to reform the systems of prestige that sustain them, are the challenges of accurately transmitting our results to the public and to end-users. Solutions of these problems are by nature less technical and more systemic, but this session will mention some initiatives that have the potential to succeed. It will also raise awareness of the economics of publishing, and discuss initiatives both helpful and unhelpful to reform a system that unnecessarily siphons public money and labour into private pockets.

Methods Workshops

Students will benefit from additional optional workshops on Methods and Analysis, including:

1. Power analysis and simulation -Taught by Dr Daniel Toribio-Florez, PostDoc at the University of Kent. This session will review the basics of statistical power, offers recommendations for assessing it, and includes practical exercises in R to learn how to conduct power simulations.
2. Meta-analysis. Led by Dr Mikey Biddlestone, PostDoc at the University of Kent.
3. Bayes Analysis. Dr Simon Myers, a former PostDoc at the University of Kent, will focus on hypothesis testing and model comparison through default/reference Bayes Factors and the more recent Bayes Factor Functions.
4. Reproducibility and version control. Dr Scott Claessens, PostDoc at the University of Kent, will give students a crash course in reproducibility and version control in scientific research, using the targets R package and Git/GitHub.

Early Career Mentoring

In addition to these workshops, students will have the opportunity to participate in a Mentoring Session led by Dr. Jim Everett and Professor Aleksandra Cichocka, both Social Psychologists at the University of Kent and past recipients of the EASP Early Career Award. This session offers a supportive environment for students to discuss potential challenges of academia, receive advice on career-planning, and address any questions they may have.

Editor Feedback

Finally, a special “Editor Feedback” session, hosted by Dominic Abrams and Michael Hogg, Editors of Group Processes & Intergroup Relations (GPIR), will offer valuable insights into the publication process. They will be joined by other Past and Current Editors of leading journals in the field, including Roger Giner-Sorolla, past Editor of Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (JESP), to help students understand the editorial process and learn best practices for publishing their research.