Not All Flexibility P-Hacking Is, Young Padawan

During a recent workshop on Sample Size Justification an early career researcher asked me: “You recommend sequential analysis in your paper for when effect sizes are uncertain, where researchers collect data, analyze the data, stop when a test is significant, or continue data collection when a test is not significant, and, I don’t want to be rude, but isn’t this p-hacking?”

In linguistics there is a term for when children apply a rule they have learned to instances where it does not apply: Overregularization. They learn ‘one cow, two cows’, and use the +s rule for plural where it is not appropriate, such as ‘one mouse, two mouses’ (instead of ‘two mice’). The early career researcher who asked me if sequential analysis was a form of p-hacking was also overregularizing. We teach young researchers that flexibly analyzing data inflates error rates, is called p-hacking, and is a very bad thing that was one of the causes of the replication crisis. So, they apply the rule ‘flexibility in the data analysis is a bad thing’ to cases where it does not apply, such as in the case of sequential analyses. Yes, sequential analyses give a lot of flexibility to stop data collection, but it does so while carefully controlling error rates, with the added bonus that it can increase the efficiency of data collection. This makes it a good thing, not p-hacking.

 

Children increasingly use correct language the longer they are immersed in it. Many researchers are not yet immersed in an academic environment where they see flexibility in the data analysis applied correctly. Many are scared to do things wrong, which risks becoming overly conservative, as the pendulum from ‘we are all p-hacking without realizing the consequences’ swings back to far to ‘all flexibility is p-hacking’. Therefore, I patiently explain during workshops that flexibility is not bad per se, but that making claims without controlling your error rate is problematic.

In a recent podcast episode of ‘Quantitude’ one of the hosts shared a similar experience 5 minutes into the episode. A young student remarked that flexibility during the data analysis was ‘unethical’. The remainder of the podcast episode on ‘researcher degrees of freedom’ discussed how flexibility is part of data analysis. They clearly state that p-hacking is problematic, and opportunistic motivations to perform analyses that give you what you want to find should be constrained. But they then criticized preregistration in ways many people on Twitter disagreed with. They talk about ‘high priests’ who want to ‘stop bad people from doing bad things’ which they find uncomfortable, and say ‘you can not preregister every contingency’. They remark they would be surprised if data could be analyzed without requiring any on the fly judgment.

Although the examples they gave were not very good¹ it is of course true that researchers sometimes need to deviate from an analysis plan. Deviating from an analysis plan is not p-hacking. But when people talk about preregistration, we often see overregularization: “Preregistration requires specifying your analysis plan to prevent inflation of the Type 1 error rate, so deviating from a preregistration is not allowed.” The whole point of preregistration is to transparently allow other researchers to evaluate the severity of a test, both when you stick to the preregistered statistical analysis plan, as when you deviate from it. Some researchers have sufficient experience with the research they do that they can preregister an analysis that does not require any deviations², and then readers can see that the Type 1 error rate for the study is at the level specified before data collection. Other researchers will need to deviate from their analysis plan because they encounter unexpected data. Some deviations reduce the severity of the test by inflating the Type 1 error rate. But other deviations actually get you closer to the truth. We can not know which is which. A reader needs to form their own judgment about this.

A final example of overregularization comes from a person who discussed a new study that they were preregistering with a junior colleague. They mentioned the possibility of including a covariate in an analysis but thought that was too exploratory to be included in the preregistration. The junior colleague remarked: “But now that we have thought about the analysis, we need to preregister it”. Again, we see an example of overregularization. If you want to control the Type 1 error rate in a test, preregister it, and follow the preregistered statistical analysis plan. But researchers can, and should, explore data to generate hypotheses about things that are going on in their data. You can preregister these, but you do not have to. Not exploring data could even be seen as research waste, as you are missing out on the opportunity to generate hypotheses that are informed by data. A case can be made that researchers should regularly include variables to explore (e.g., measures that are of general interest to peers in their field), as long as these do not interfere with the primary hypothesis test (and as long as these explorations are presented as such).

In the book “Reporting quantitative research in psychology: How to meet APA Style Journal Article Reporting Standards” by Cooper and colleagues from 2020 a very useful distinction is made between primary hypotheses, secondary hypotheses, and exploratory hypotheses. The first consist of the main tests you are designing the study for. The secondary hypotheses are also of interest when you design the study – but you might not have sufficient power to detect them. You did not design the study to test these hypotheses, and because the power for these tests might be low, you did not control the Type 2 error rate for secondary hypotheses. You can preregister secondary hypotheses to control the Type 1 error rate, as you know you will perform them, and if there are multiple secondary hypotheses, as Cooper et al (2020) remark, readers will expect “adjusted levels of statistical significance, or conservative post hoc means tests, when you conducted your secondary analysis”.

If you think of the possibility to analyze a covariate, but decide this is an exploratory analysis, you can decide to neither control the Type 1 error rate nor the Type 2 error rate. These are analyses, but not tests of a hypothesis, as any findings from these analyses have an unknown Type 1 error rate. Of course, that does not mean these analyses can not be correct in what they reveal – we just have no way to know the long run probability that exploratory conclusions are wrong. Future tests of the hypotheses generated in exploratory analyses are needed. But as long as you follow Journal Article Reporting Standards and distinguish exploratory analyses, readers know what the are getting. Exploring is not p-hacking.

People in psychology are re-learning the basic rules of hypothesis testing in the wake of the replication crisis. But because they are not yet immersed in good research practices, the lack of experience means they are overregularizing simplistic rules to situations where they do not apply. Not all flexibility is p-hacking, preregistered studies do not prevent you from deviating from your analysis plan, and you do not need to preregister every possible test that you think of. A good cure for overregularization is reasoning from basic principles. Do not follow simple rules (or what you see in published articles) but make decisions based on an understanding of how to achieve your inferential goal. If the goal is to make claims with controlled error rates, prevent Type 1 error inflation, for example by correcting the alpha level where needed. If your goal is to explore data, feel free to do so, but know these explorations should be reported as such. When you design a study, follow the Journal Article Reporting Standards and distinguish tests with different inferential goals.

 

¹ E.g., they discuss having to choose between Student’s t-test and Welch’s t-test, depending on wheter Levene’s test indicates the assumption of homogeneity is violated, which is not best practice – just follow R, and use Welch’s t-test by default.

² But this is rare – only 2 out of 27 preregistered studies in Psychological Science made no deviations. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.211037 We can probably do a bit better if we only preregistered predictions at a time where we really understand our manipulations and measures.