Quantitative research without measurement. Reinterpreting the better-than-average-effect

Strategy Development of Macroeconomics on Performance Financial Banking

“…The research design used is explanatory research which describes quantitatively a symptom, event and incident that occurs factually, systematically and accurately (Franz, 2023). This research was carried out from August to October 2022.…”

Approaching psychology’s current crises by exploring the vagueness of psychological concepts: Recommendations for advancing the discipline.

“…Although there is nothing to be said against precisely defining how a certain concept is understood and applied in a given context (e.g., in the context of an empirical investigation), it does not help to circumvent the vagueness of psychological concepts: To begin with, even if researchers agreed on stress technical , participants may still bring their own understanding of the concept of stress into the investigation. This potentially influences how participants respond to the researchers' questions and instructions, making it unclear whether the collected data really speak to stress technical (see Franz, 2023, for a related line of reasoning). Even if one tried to avoid this by refraining from using the term "stress" during the investigation (which can be difficult as researchers need to instruct their participants, which will in many cases make the use of stress-related vocabulary necessary), by providing participants with a sophisticated cover story, or by focusing solely on more objective parameters for which the subjective understanding of the participants does not matter that much (e.g., changes in hormones levels or brain activity), the problem would arise again at other stages of the research process.…”

“…Arguably, investigating whether researchers and participants in the original and replication study share a sufficiently similar understanding of the research material would greatly benefit from an inclusion of qualitative methods as these methods are designed to capture subjective perceptions and interpretations (cf. Franz, 2023). This seems particularly important when there is reason to suspect that the circumstances of the replication attempt differ significantly from the circumstances of the original study.…”

“…On the one hand, strong formal theories are notoriously hard to formulate, as they require robust psychological phenomena, well-defined constructs, and valid ways of measuring these constructs (Eronen & Bringmann, 2021). The possibilities and limits of measuring constructs in psychology is itself a topic that has remained highly controversial even after decades of intense debate (e.g., Franz, 2022aFranz, , 2022bFranz, , 2023Lovasz & Slaney, 2013;Maraun, 1998;Michell, 1997;Slaney & Racine, 2013). Consequently, formalized mathematical models in psychology that require valid ways of measuring constructs are at least as controversial as the measurement of psychological constructs itself.…”

“…From this follows that a replication study can only provide information about the effects observed in the original study if the context relevant to our interpretation of the phenomenon under investigation is similarly instantiated—irrespective of whether the replication attempt is direct or conceptual. The arguments that we provided in this article point to two basic requirements for sufficient similarity between the phenomena investigated in original and replication studies: First, researchers and participants in the original study should share a similar understanding of the study material (e.g., stimuli, instructions, items; see Franz, 2023). Second, participants’ understanding of the material should be sufficiently similar in the original study and in the replication attempt.…”