Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A catalogue of 34 binary choices an analyst could have made in a behavioural-economics study.
- Is an instance
A registered report locking each of these choices in advance.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A coin flip (no analyst decisions involved).
- Not an instance
A pre-specified single-model analysis (degrees of freedom collapsed to one).
Editorial commentary
Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn (2011) coined the term to explain why nominally well-conducted studies could nevertheless yield false positives at far above the nominal 5% rate. Researcher degrees of freedom are the substrate on which p-hacking, HARKing, and the forking paths — CASRAI Dictionary">garden of forking paths all act. Pre-registration constrains them; multiverse analyses expose their effect.
References
- Simmons, Nelson, Simonsohn, 'False-positive psychology' (Psychological Science, 2011); Wicherts et al., 'Degrees of freedom in planning, running, analyzing, and reporting psychological studies' (Frontiers in Psychology, 2016).
Also known as
analytic degrees of freedom
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Researcher degrees of freedom"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/researcher-degrees-of-freedom" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"name": "Researcher degrees of freedom",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/researcher-degrees-of-freedom",
"description": "The decisions an analyst makes during a study (inclusion criteria, outcome definition, model specification, covariate set) any of which, if made differently, would yield a different result.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/reproducibility-and-computational-research/",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/researcher-degrees-of-freedom",
"sameAs": [
"analytic degrees of freedom"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
}
