The hottest Research Methodology Substack posts right now

The recent study on parental acceptance of HPV vaccinations has major flaws that make its results questionable. Problems include small sample sizes and not enough diversity in participants.
There is growing concern about HPV type replacement, where non-vaccine types may become more common after vaccination. This could lead to an increase in HPV-related cancers despite vaccination efforts.
Future studies on HPV vaccine efficacy need to focus more on long-term effects and should clearly address issues like type replacement and the percentage of cancers caused by non-vaccine-targeted HPV types.

The study compared schools with only slight differences in phone policies, making it hard to see if phone restrictions really help students.
The research didn't truly prove which phone policies caused changes in student mental health or grades, since it mainly showed correlations.
There were issues with how they measured students' academic performance and phone use, which could affect the study's conclusions.

The U.S. Dietary Guidelines are based on low-quality science that is hard to replicate. This raises questions about their reliability for healthy eating.
A new study found serious flaws in how the USDA reviews the research for these guidelines, including mistakes in their search strategies and lack of transparency.
Despite criticism and calls for improvement, the USDA has not made the necessary updates to ensure the guidelines are trustworthy and based on solid research.

People can experience discrimination even if it happens very rarely. For example, studies show that something like 36% more callbacks were given to White job applicants compared to Black ones, even though only a small number of actual discriminatory acts occurred.
There are different ways to look at discrimination: one way focuses on how often discrimination happens in actions, and another looks at the overall impact on people's experiences. This can make it seem like there are contradictions in findings about discrimination.
Small amounts of discrimination can still have a big effect, especially in competitive situations. Even if discrimination happens infrequently, it can lead to significant problems for those affected, such as fewer job opportunities.

Creating 96-well plate maps is important for organizing samples and tracking metadata during scientific experiments. This helps scientists during pipetting and later data analysis.
Current methods for making plate maps, like using spreadsheets, can be clunky and error-prone as they often require managing multiple tables that are not linked.
A new visual plate mapper allows for easy creation and editing of plate maps. It synchronizes the visual layout with a data table, making it simpler to manage and analyze experiment data.

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Personality models show consistent traits across languages, especially the Big Two: social self-regulation and dynamism.
Understanding personality across languages requires bilingual cohorts or careful translations, as words may not have direct equivalents.
Research suggests that analyzing language models in multiple languages could lead to a universal model of personality, potentially superior to the Big Five.

Using silly examples to teach correlation and causation can let students off too easily. It's important to challenge them with examples that make them think.
Most teaching examples use time-series data, but many real-world correlations don't fit this model. We should focus on typical variations found in research.
Mixing random correlations with spurious connections creates confusion. Teaching should clearly explain how confounders can lead to false relationships.

The rise of social media has led to many influencers promoting diet and nutrition advice, sometimes based on questionable science.
Blogging offers the chance to discuss complex scientific ideas in detail, something that social media platforms struggle to support.
Becoming a nutrition expert involves navigating issues like scientific rigor and the hype in popular media, which can be discouraging but also drives the desire to share knowledge.

Many studies look at how past events affect the present but often don't help us understand future outcomes. It's easy to tell stories about what happened before, but challenging to predict how current events will shape the future.
Some research does use past events to study how systems and institutions work, which is more useful. These studies can help us understand why some countries thrive while others do not.
Not all papers in the persistence literature are valuable. If they only focus on how past events influence today without making any connections to the future, they might not be worth our time.