Replication is a term referring to the repetition of a research study, generally with different situations and different subjects, to determine if the basic findings of the original study can be applied to other participants and circumstances. Once a study has been conducted, researchers might be interested in determining if the results hold true in other settings or for other populations. In other cases, scientists may want to replicate the experiment to further demonstrate the results.
For example, imagine that health psychologists perform an experiment showing that hypnosis can be effective in helping middle-aged smokers kick their nicotine habit. Other researchers might want to replicate the same study with younger smokers to see if they reach the same result. When studies are replicated and achieve the same or similar results as the original study, it gives greater validity to the findings.
When conducting a study or experiment , it is essential to have clearly defined operational definitions. In other words, what is the study attempting to measure? When replicating earlier researchers, experimenters will follow the same procedures but with a different group of participants. So what happens if the original results cannot be reproduced? Does that mean that the experimenters conducted bad research or that, even worse, they lied or fabricated their data? In many cases, non-replicated research is caused by differences in the participants or in other extraneous variables that might influence the results of an experiment.
For example, minor differences in things like the way questions are presented, the weather, or even the time of day the study is conducted might have an unexpected impact on the results of an experiment. Researchers might strive to perfectly reproduce the original study, but variations are expected and often impossible to avoid.
In , a group of researchers published the results of their five-year effort to replicate different experimental studies previously published in three top psychology journals. The results were less than stellar. As one might expect, these dismal findings caused quite a stir. So why are psychology results so difficult to replicate? Writing for The Guardian , John Ioannidis suggested that there are a number of reasons why this might happen, including competition for research funds and the powerful pressure to obtain significant results.
There is little incentive to retest, so many results obtained purely by chance are simply accepted without further research or scrutiny. The project authors suggest that there are three potential reasons why the original findings could not be replicated.
The Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman has suggested that because published studies are often too vague in describing methods used, replications should involve the authors of the original studies in order to more carefully mirror the methods and procedures used in the original research.
Unless some of them start setting aside space for replication studies, the resources assigned to research validation will continue to decline, and flawed research that cannot be validated will be allowed to persist without challenge or retraction. Enago Academy, the knowledge arm of Enago, offers comprehensive and up-to-date resources on academic research and scholarly publishing to all levels of scholarly professionals: students, researchers, editors, publishers, and academic societies.
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Importance of Replication Studies Scientific transparency. Reading time 3 minutes. Scientific transparency. Author Enago Academy. Scientists know any important result will be subjected to attempts at replication.
This provides a powerful incentive for honesty among researchers. Students are taught that a research report should include all necessary details to permit replication. However, it is often impossible to find all relevant details about how research is conducted in a published report of research. Sometimes, to carry out an exact replication, one must contact earlier researchers to learn details of a procedure.
Gasparikova-Krasnec and Ging found that researchers were generally cooperative in providing information needed for replications. A month's wait was normally all that was required. Researchers typically realize that double-checking surprising results is important to science. A failed replication may have a stimulating effect on a field of research.
Replication failures inspire new studies to figure out why an attempt to use the "same" procedures led to different results. A fine-grained analysis of the experimental procedures may reveal some key details that were different, when comparing the original study to the replication.
If a replication fails, but the original researchers believe their original finding is correct, they will suggest ways to tighten up controls or other procedures to improve the chances of a successful replication. They hope the results will come back if another replication is attempted with improved techniques. On some occasions, replication failures continue. False claims—including those that start as honest mistakes—produce a distinctive pattern during successive attempts at replication: the effects get smaller and smaller as more replications are conducted.
This happened, for example, in the case of cold fusion: a desktop apparatus was said to produce fusion energy. In psychology, it happened with cardiac conditioning : claims that heart rates could be altered directly through conditioning procedures.
Diminishing effects with repeated replications occur not because an actual effect is disappearing, but because scientists are eliminating errors with better controls, as they make additional attempts at replication. A solid, scientific finding will gain more support as people continue to test it. A false lead or quack science claim will become less solid as people continue to test it.
Gasparikova-Krasnec, M. Experimental replication and professional cooperation. American Psychologist, 41 , Prev page Page top Chapter Contents Next page. Don't see what you need? Psych Web has over 1, pages, so it may be elsewhere on the site. Do a site-specific Google search using the box below.
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