Happy New Year, folks! I hope 2017 brings you health and happiness.
Just a wee news item to let you know that this week Jim Kennedy and I published a short methodological paper about prospective meta-analysis (this grew out of the paper we presented at the 2016 PA/SSE conference in Boulder, Colorado).
A quick summary: We note that the principles of pre-registered well-powered confirmatory research apply for meta-analyses as well as for individual studies. The outcomes of meta-analyses of parapsychological studies, for example, have been hotly debated. An important contributory factor to such controversy is that the researcher makes many decisions about how to conduct the meta-analysis (e.g., which studies to include or exclude), and these decisions are typically made after the results of the individual studies are known. So typical retrospective meta-analysis resembles exploratory research and allows potential for researcher bias to operate. This delays resolution of scientific controversies. Parapsychology is not alone in this: similar issues occur elsewhere in psychology too. We discuss the pros and cons of three different methods for prospective meta-analysis, and note how study registries can deliver further benefits if they are used to register prospective meta-analyses of pre-registered studies.
Click here to read our full paper.
Watt CA and Kennedy JE (2017) Options for Prospective Meta-Analysis and Introduction of Registration-Based Prospective Meta-Analysis. Front. Psychol. 7:2030. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.02030
koestlerunit.wordpress.com 
Dear Prof. Caroline Watt,
as a studied Philospher, who wrote “Nietzsche: Der Nihilismus als die innere Logik der Metaphysik” I would be glad, to have the possibility to visit your Institute in the near future.
With kind regards
Heinz W. Rutetzki
LikeLike
The suggested protocols offer a cautious but incremental advance in a field considerably more prone to prejudice and uniformed criticism than those sciences that have been allowed to build upon their past findings rather than having to perpetually justify their existence.
LikeLike