New Data, New Statistics: from Reproducibility Crisis toward New Requirements to Data Analysis and Presentation in Social Sciences

New Data, New Statistics:
from Reproducibility Crisis toward New Requirements to Data Analysis and Presentation in Social Sciences


Deviatko I.F.

Dr. Sci. (Soc.), Full Professor, National Research University Higher School of Economics; Chief Researcher, Institute of Sociology of the Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia deviatko@gmail.com

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Deviatko I.F. New Data, New Statistics: from Reproducibility Crisis toward New Requirements to Data Analysis and Presentation in Social Sciences . Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya [Sociological Studies]. 2018. No 12. P. 30-38




Abstract

The article analyzes main causes and consequences of the interdisciplinary crisis of the reproducibility and reliability of the results of scientific research that has unfolded in the social sciences in parallel with the «data revolution». This crisis is expressed not only in the growing concern of scientists about the reliability of research results and the possibilities to establish the practices securing the transparency of empirical data and the statistical software used for their analysis, but also in disputes on limitations of the routine approach to significance testing and feasibility of alternatives based on Bayesian approach. Some aspects of the relationship between theory and data-driven methods of searching for patterns in empirical data are briefly discussed in the context of describing a new approach to multimodel analysis aiming at evaluation of model robustness and model uncertainty.


Keywords
reproducibility crisis in social sciences; transparency of data and open data; publication bias; null hypothesis significance testing and Bayesian approach; model robustness; data-driven approach and sociological theory

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Content No 12, 2018