As part of the course on applied statistics I’m teaching, my students have to try to replicate a published paper (or, typically, part of the analysis). It’s an excellent opportunity to apply what they have learned in the course, and probably the best way to teach researcher degrees of freedom and how much we should trust the results of a single study. It’s also an excellent reminder to do better than much of the published research in providing proper details of the analysis we undertake. Common problems include not describing the selection of cases (where not everyone remains in the sample), opaque recoding of variables, and variables that are not described. An interesting case is the difference between what the authors wanted to do (e.g. restrict the sample to voters) and what they apparently did (e.g. forge to do so). One day, I hope this exercise will become obsolete: the day my students can readily download replication code…
Image: CC-by-nd Tina Sherwood Imaging https://flic.kr/p/8iz7qS
Didier Ruedin 