#research-methods
26 articles
- Quantifying Human-Technical Stability: My Final Survey Deck & Its Weakest Slide
Five minutes to pitch a survey I designed end to end. One slide carries the whole validity argument, and that slide has a circularity problem.
- Sex Differences in PTSD: The Response Paper Where I Confused Prevalence with Vulnerability
Women have higher PTSD rates and lower trauma exposure. My draft read that as fragility. The meta-analysis says something more careful and more interesting.
- Letter to Reviewers: Answering Every Critique of My Scale in Writing
Ten critique points across eight sections, answered one by one. Sorting my replies revealed the pattern: my concessions were cheap and my refusals expensive.
- Nonresponse Bias Strategy: Planning for the People Who Won't Answer
Four strategies, submitted and defensible. Then I reread my own sentence about leveraging positional power to convert refusals — in a study about power.
- The Public Speaking Final Exam: Studying for a Test About Talking
A silent final with 54 questions showed which half of public speaking a paper test can measure — and how much the recordings contributed.
- My TKI Conflict Mode Results & the Instrument That Wasn't the TKI
A syllabus linked a free sample test and called it the TKI. Six modes, 36 items, a formula predicting who wins. The real instrument has none of those.
- Inhibited and Uninhibited: Kagan's Temperament Study & the Child I Was
Kagan followed 462 infants for seven years. The finding isn't that temperament predicts who you become — it's that it closes off one corner of the range.
- Upward, Downward, Sideways: The Axis That Decides Whether a Comparison Helps
Upward or downward turns out to be the wrong question. Whether you see the person as reachable decides the outcome — and that is a judgment you make.
- The Etymology Exercise: Tracing "Privilege" to Its Root & What the Root Can't Tell You
An assignment sends you to a word's Indo-European root. Privilege comes apart into private and law, and the derivative list shows why a root is not a meaning.
- Section 9: The Ethics Code I Break Every Time I Take a Free Quiz
Eleven rules govern how psychological tests may be used. I ran one quiz result I'd happily posted against all of them, and stopped defending myself.
- The Telephone Survey Is Dying: Reading the Task Force Report on What Replaces It
Cell-only households went from 3% to 57% in fifteen years. The profession's own task force says the replacement is unsettled, and is honest about it.
- Normal Is Not the Same as Precise: The Histogram I Misread for Three Years
Simulating 1,000 samples finally made the central limit theorem click — and then showed me I'd spent three years misreading my own histogram.
- Shared Vulnerability: The Model, the Audit & the Studies They Both Point At
Carson cites Andreasen and Jamison as warrant. Schlesinger goes back to those originals. One number sits in both papers, meaning different things.
- Grading the Grader: Reading the Duolingo English Test's Own Validity Evidence
Duolingo publishes strong validity research for its English test. Reading it closely, the problem isn't the numbers — it's the sentence they get turned into.
- Mental Health in Tech: The Stakes I Named, and the Sample That Couldn't Carry Them
Before touching the data I named stigma, geography, and legal stakes. The country breakdown then showed which of the three this sample could not carry.
- DORA Quick Check - A Critique
A benchmark that scores your team's delivery performance in under a minute. The speed is the product — and why two developers score it differently.
- Building the Catastrophizing Scale: Construction Log & Honest Audit
Three of us built a psychometric scale from nothing — construct, items, peer review, analysis. The honest log: strong reliability, weak validity, an N of 7.
- Industry Was a Costume: Seventy of Us Described the Same Tool and Thought It Was Ours
Seventy classmates described AI tools by industry. Underneath the costumes, we had all reached for the same few tools.
- No Root Cause: What Coincidence Analysis Taught Me About Organizational Interventions
Coincidence Analysis taught me that organizational change may not have one root cause — just different sufficient recipes for the same outcome.
- From Needs Assessment to Recommendation: The Belonging Fund Project
My team designed a fund to help students feel they belonged. Our biggest limitation was that we never spoke to a single student.
- Religiosity vs. GDP: A Regression That Passed Every Check — and a Causal Story It Can't Tell
A clean regression linked religiosity and GDP. That statistical cleanliness is exactly why the causal story needs more caution.
- MGNREGA: The Regression That Held — and the State Where the Budget Line Goes to Zero
A regression linked MGNREGA labor budgets to women’s paid workdays. Then West Bengal’s frozen funds tested what the chart could honestly say.
- The QA Manager, Part III: The Satisfaction Survey I Built — and Every Way It Could Mislead Me
I built a six-question satisfaction survey for a QA manager role, then audited every way my own instrument could mislead me.
- VulnerABLE Pan-European Survey - A Critique
A European survey set out to hear from isolated and vulnerable people. Its own method may have quietly changed what those people felt safe saying.
- Defining Fairness Through Accessibility: The Invisible Tax of Shifting Baselines
When a test measures barriers instead of ability, the score becomes evidence of the system around the person, not just the person.
- Gender & Competitiveness: Not More. Not Less. Just Different.
Men and women compete differently — not more or less. These are my generalized views drawn from weekly readings and research in my course work.