Mark Rubin

Although previous research has found social class differences in students’ academic performance at university, success in higher education is far more multi-faceted. This study surveyed 2,665 undergraduate students from six Australian universities to investigate mediators of class differences in success, where success was operationalised using diverse and comprehensive measures (e.g., academic self-efficacy, cognitive engagement). Importantly, class was operationalised as a continuous variable rather than arbitrary quartiles. Mediation analyses showed consistent relationships between class and sense of success. Economic capital was identified as the main mediator, followed by social connections, cultural expectations, and aspirations. Some criteria—particularly greater interdependent motivation to be a role model for their community and assist their families after university—were more important in success evaluations for students from backgrounds with lower measures of socioeconomic class. Interdependent motivations suppressed some of the negative effects of lower class, providing evidence of alternative capitals or personal motivational resources. We conclude that conceptions of educational success that elide non-academic forms of success and minimise student’s motivations, especially community-based motivations, offer a limited and limiting understanding of the student experience.

New study finds university students from lower social class backgrounds are more likely to gauge their success at uni by the positive impact they have on their families and communities.

Open Access: doi.org/10.63608/ssj...

#AcademicSky #HigherEd #SocialPsyc

No worries! And thank god for preprints!

And...

#AcadrmicSky #AcWri

See also...

Adversarial peer review - gatekeeping against "junk science" that would "pollute" the precious literature.

Constructive peer review - a more collaborative approach aimed at improving authors' work.

Thread on how the adversarial approach prompts defensive strategies in authors...

Durham, UK, tonight

As is apparent, the word positivism is used in completely different contexts. We might just mention Auguste Comte, for instance: he is known by some people as the founder of positivism. Frankly, I cannot possibly list all the people who call themselves either proponents or enemies of positivism, but I can assure you that they all use the word in a somewhat different sense from the two uses I have mentioned. Perhaps we can cross out the word 'positivism', which was devised to irritate German audiences, and use 'demarcationism', which is an ugly word. Anyway, I do not mind what we call it: just remember the constant confusion surrounding the word 'positivism' in the last few hundred years. Whenever you hear the word, ask for a definition, substitute the definition and forget about the word.

I like Lakatos’ approach to this….

press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

I heard Spencer Greenberg talk about this on a pod (2 psychologists 4 beers) a few months back and thought it seems like a really cool project. I like how they randomly select studies to replicate. Often estimates of "replication rate" (or of median power) have an unclear denominator imo

It probably is! As with all, QRP's there's probably also a sizeable grey area between deliberately masking the true meaning of a result to inflate its importance and making a genuine interpretational error about the nature of the result (e.g., mistaking "crud" for an important effect).

‘Positivism’ refers broadly to the philosophical approach that emphasises the use of observable, empirical evidence and scientific methods to uncover objective truths about the world that can be refuted (Popper, 2002). Popper’s critique of positivism lay in its concept of true knowledge as that which could be empirically verified, however for our purposes, we define it more broadly as a perspective associated with the scientific method which seeks true knowledge about objective reality (Braun & Clarke, 2022a: p.292).

They do: "A perspective associated with the scientific method which seeks true knowledge about objective reality (Braun & Clarke, 2022a: p.292)."

See also this recent article by
@ginnybraun.bsky.social
@janeemcallaghan.bsky.social @andrealamarre.bsky.social
@joannasemlyen.bsky.social
@jeffnz.bsky.social

#PhilSci #Epistemology #OpenSci #MetaSci

Open Science and Epistemic Pluralism Comment on Bazzoli (2022)

Also reminds me of:

“Despite the fact that open science practices are neither mandatory nor one-size-fits-all, there may be an unconscious motive to encourage the uptake of these practices within non-postpositivist research paradigms because they’re believed to be beneficial for science in general”

“Those who ‘call out’ the existence of the contemporary version of positivism are sometimes accused of name-calling, promoting a strawman argument (as something that is dead, positivism is invoked for unspecified but nefarious motives), and even embracing a form of paranoia” (Kincheloe & Tobin 2015)

Over the past three decades all educational researchers know that there has been great controversy around the nature of knowledge production and research as well as the politics of knowledge. One of the common themes of this debate over knowledge involves the assertion that positivism is dead, a discredited epistemology that has been replaced by more contemporary and updated philosophies of research. The main thesis of this essay is that such an assumption is misleading and can be quite dangerous in supporting modes of research that provide distorted pictures of the educational world, promote particular values and worldviews, and often harm individuals who suffer marginalized status around diverse axes of power – e.g., race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, relation to colonialism, etc. A central dimension of our argument is that many of the tenets of positivism are so embedded within Western culture, academia, and the world of education in particular that they are often invisible to researchers and those who consume their research. Various points in this debate have been published in many journals and books on numerous occasions. Thus, we will attempt to address the issue in the context of “where we are now” – in the Zeitgeist and social context of the contemporary era

Reminds me of Kincheloe & Tobin (2015): doi.org/10.1163/9789...

“The crypto-positivist ideology is not perceived as oppressive and its role in quashing [non-positivist] research is not acknowledged.”

“We…recommend a measured but firm resistance to the positivism creep coming from the push for open science.”

“The imposition of open science practices developed for quantitative research onto qualitative paradigms exemplifies a form of positivism creep, where positivist norms subtly extend their influence under the banner of openness and transparency.”

“At the broadest level, positivism creep impacts how we think about what good, robust, credible research looks like. A common example is the uncritical use of terms like 'researcher bias,' a concept rooted in positivist ideals of objectivity and neutrality.”

“Positivism Creep”

“The subtle, often unacknowledged infiltration of positivist or post-positivist assumptions into methodologies where they do not naturally, philosophically, practically, or epistemologically belong.”

By @thomasgraves.bsky.social @maddipow.bsky.social @annayahprosser.bsky.social

There was this statement back in September.

And recent work by @gordonhodsonphd.bsky.social

#SocialPsyc #Conflict

Research on intergroup contact has grown exponentially over the past decade. Such research has typically extolled the benefits of positive interaction between members of historically divided communities, particularly on outcomes related to prejudice reduction. Emerging work in the field, however, has qualified this optimistic picture by identifying three gaps in the existing literature. First, in everyday life, contact may be construed as a negative experience that increases rather than decreases responses such as prejudice, anxiety, and avoidance. Second, in real-life settings, contact is often circumscribed by informal practices of (re)segregation that are easily overlooked if researchers rely primarily on examining structured contact and explicit processes using primarily laboratory and questionnaire methods. Third, positive contact may have “ironic” effects on the political attitudes and behaviors of the historically disadvantaged, undermining their recognition of social injustice and decreasing their willingness to engage in collective action to challenge the status quo. Although it is now a truism that intergroup contact can reduce intergroup prejudice, these developments emphasize the importance of maintaining a critical perspective on the “contact hypothesis” as a model for promoting social change in historically divided and unequal societies. They also lay the foundations for future developments in the field.

For more see, McKeown and Dixon (2017): doi.org/10.1111/spc3...

Excellent presentation today by @shelleymckeown.bsky.social at Durham University in which she considered two “problems” with intergroup contact:

(1) Does contact lead to *within* person change in attitudes?

(2) Does contact even happen in the first place?

Yes, it's "obscuring or exaggerating the meaning of results to make them appear to have more value or interest than they really have so as to get them published, when in reality (if reviewers understood the true meaning of results) they would be unlikely to recommend the paper for publication."

UK Government boosts investment in metascience - Research on Research The UK government has announced a major increase in funding for metascience over the next four years, including a more […]

UK Metascience Funding

"The UK government has announced a major increase in funding for metascience over the next four years, including a more than trebling of investment in the UK Metascience Unit."

"Importance Hacking and/or errors affect most papers, and appear to be much bigger issues than p-hacking!"

"Public availability of data and materials is widespread, yet deviations from pre-registration are commonly not acknowledged."

Three Surprises From Attempting To Replicate Recent Studies in Top Psychology Journals Amanda Metskas December 4, 2025 How has the replication rate of psychology studies changed in recent years? Are we still experiencing a “replication crisis,” where only 40-60% of results replicate when the study is conducted again?

"Replication rates are higher than experts predicted and p-hacking is much less common than we expected!"

replications.clearerthinking.org/three-surpri...

She might be getting sent stuff intended for you?!

"What can be done about effects of demand characteristics is acknowledging their potential contribution to the effect, and discussing in good faith how a demand account – as any other competing account – represents a sensible alternative for the interpretation of the data."

#SocialPsyc #PsycSci

I really like this one. We've said for years that partialling changes variables in ways that are difficult to know. Here, we show the latter. Be careful out there. Anxiety with depression partialled is not anxiety.