2020 has been an extraordinary year in every sense of the word. Many of you got a tough lesson in resilience with your research plan being interrupted or even obliterated due to extreme weather or pandemic. Some may have taken the time to use this forced pause to upskill and we have certainly been encouraged by the enrolment numbers in our online courses that statistics was one of those areas that researchers chose to focus on.
At the end of the year it is natural to reflect and review. So in that spirit, let’s have a look at some statistics in 2020.
The year social media got mixed in with world power
Trying to stay clear of politics, it is hard to deny that social media have played a major role in the latest US presidential election. When you look at the statistics it is not too hard to understand why. At the start of the year, more than 3.8 billion people used social media. That is more than half of the world population.
Interestingly, in the US this proportion is much higher with 79% of Americans having a social media profile. Whilst social media is still most popular with younger people, a blind person could see that if you want to disseminate your message to as many people as possible, social media is the way to go. Therefore, it is not unsurprising that social media have moved away from connecting with friend and family towards advertising platform for brands. In 2019 alone, the marketing spend on social media advertising exceeded 89 billion USD.
Social media is also on the rise within academia. With the introduction of altmetrics as a possible performance indicator, social media can boost your researcher profile like never before.
The year misuse of statistics got called out
As researchers, we are all committed to responsible research practice. This includes appropriate use of statistics. Therefore, it is noteworthy that p-hacking and optional stopping (with the aim of obtaining a statistically significant result) have been judged to have violated the code of conduct for research integrity in The Netherlands.
There is a bit of history to this and for a full expose, please refer to this blog post by Daniel Lakens. In brief, when the fraudulent research practices of social psychologist Diederik Stapel came out, the research culture was referred to as “sloppy science”. But they didn’t go as far as calling it a violation of the research integrity code of conduct.
However, in July 2020 the Dutch National Body for Scientific Integrity did judge a Dutch researcher from Leiden University to have violated the code by p-hacking and optional stopping. Norms change and what was once a misdemeanour is now a violation of the code.
P-hacking is only one of a range of data misuse techniques that are known as data dredging. The main aim is to obtain significant results by dramatically increasing the number of tests performed on a given dataset and only reporting the significant results. Similarly, optional stopping refers to the preliminary stopping of data collection when intermediate statistical tests obtain a significant result (so no further data collection is required). While the term has gone mainstream in 2019, its practice is still present in many areas of research and it’s only through education and promotion of good statistical practice that this will disappear.
The SCU saw many clients during 2020, be it in person or virtual. Our mission continues in 2021 and we are the port of call for assistance with your data analysis plan.