There is a great article in the Weekly Standard titled Making It All Up, the Behavioral Sciences Scandal about how over 60 percent of published results in the field of Psychology are not reproducible. Here and here are articles from the journal Nature on the same subject along with another one from the journal Science. I sent my daughter, Kelly a link to the articles. She is working on a PhD in Marketing at University of Washington and takes research methodology classes from both the Sociology department and the Psychology department. Replicability is a big topic in those classes. Kelly made the argument that research done in marketing does not suffer from the same problem as in the social sciences or even the hard sciences because the measure of the quality of the research is whether more stuff gets sold. That is the point–selling stuff. So if the research does not lead to new insights into how to sell stuff, the funding dies. I think I might buy that idea. But then again, it was a Marketing researcher who told me that.
Betty Blonde #412 – 02/12/2010
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