Question

why do many psychological science research have a difficult time replicating. Why do you think trends change from study to study? What factors do you think may be involved? Is it something a researcher is doing, or is it the change in people?

Answer 1

• Many research teams cannot replicate, or match, an original study’s results. Sometimes that occurs because the original researchers faked the study.
• Many researchers also make false assumptions and others set up improper hypothesis for testing.Mistakes or an incomplete understanding of previous work by others could lead to faulty assessments.
• Some investigators have concluded that it may be next to impossible to redo a study exactly. This can be true especially when a study works with subjects or materials that vary greatly.
• Cells, animals and people are all things that have a lot of variation. Due to genetic or developmental differences, one cell or individual may respond differently to stimuli than another will. Stimuli might include foods, drugs, infectious germs or some other aspect of the environment.
• Similarly, some studies involve conditions that are quite complicated. Examples can include the weather or how crowds of people behave. Consider climate studies. Computers are not yet big enough and fast enough to account for everything that affects climate, scientists note.
  
• Eventually, time and more data may show why the findings of an original study and a repeated one differ. One of the studies may be found weak or somewhat flawed. Perhaps both will be.
• In most cases, non-replicated research is caused by differences in the participants or in other extraneous variables that might influence the results of an experiment. Sometimes the differences might not be immediately clear and in others researchers might be able to discern which variables might have impacted the results.
• In conclusion,there are three reasons that a replication might get a negative result when the original got a positive result. One, the original is a false positive, the study falsely detected evidence for an effect by chance. Two, the replication is a false negative ,the study falsely failed to detect evidence for an effect by chance. Three, there is a critical difference in the original and replication methodology that accounts for the difference.