Method sections in academic (social psychology) papers usually consist of the following sections: Participants, Design, Procedure, and Materials. They also tend to be presented in this order. But is this the right order? I don't think so.
In a recent tweet I asked the question why we use n - 1 to calculate the variance of a sample. Many people contributed an answer, but many of them were of the type I feared. Most consisted of some statistical jargon that confuses me more, rather than less. Other responses were very useful, though, so I recommend checking out the replies to the tweet. In this post, I will try to describe my favorite way of looking at the issue.
A curious thing happened in the field of social psychology: Social psychologists finally realized that statistical power is important. Unfortunately, they then skipped the step of figuring out how to do them correctly. Here I list some papers on power analyses that I hope help in improving the way we do them.