It’s Time to Broaden the Replicability Conversation: Thoughts for and From Clinical Psychological Science

Abstract

Psychology is in the early stages of examining a crisis of replicability stemming from several high-profile failures to replicate studies in experimental psychology. This important conversation has largely been focused on social psychology, with some active participation from cognitive psychology. Nevertheless, several other major domains of psychological science-including clinical science-have remained insulated from this discussion. The goals of this article are to (a) examine why clinical psychology and allied fields, such as counseling and school psychology, have not been central participants in the replicability conversation; (b) review concerns and recommendations that are less (or more) applicable to or appropriate for research in clinical psychology and allied fields; and

Replicability and generalizability of PTSD networks: A cross-cultural multisite study of PTSD symptoms in four trauma patient samples

“…K. Forbes et al, 2017b;Tackett, 2017). While network structures generalize fairly well across four heterogeneous clinical samples in the present paper, it is an open question how well PTSD networks generalize to other clinical samples or to community samples, and how well networks of other disorders replicate.…”

“…The aim of these models is to estimate network structures of psychological variables from between-subject or within-subject data. Network models are largely exploratory and data-driven, and although they use tools such as regularization to avoid overfitting data (Friedman, Hastie, & Tibshirani, 2008), it is presently unclear whether the findings from these network models replicate across different datasets, a question especially relevant considering the recent attention to replicability in psychology (Open Science Collaboration, 2015;Tackett, 2017). Quite appropriately, researchers working with network models have questioned whether we are about to face a replicability crisis in this newly developing field-and what can be done to avoid it M.…”

Philosophy of science and the replicability crisis

“…First, preregistration does not fully counter publication bias as it does not guarantee that findings will be reported (Chen et al, 2016). Second, preregistration cannot be straightforwardly implemented in some research domains (Tackett et al, 2017). Two refinements on preregistration are the Registered Reports (Chambers, 2013) and Registered Reproducibility Reports (Simons, Holcombe, & Spellman, 2014) publication models.…”

Respiratory sinus arrhythmia reactivity across empirically based structural dimensions of psychopathology: A meta‐analysis

“…Future evaluations comparing different types of attention tasks on RSA reactivity may be useful in disentangling this unpredictability (cf. Suess, Porges, & Plude, 1994).…”