Decisions, Decisions Posted on December 4, 2007 Research is all about collaborative decisions, states Jay Belsky (bio).

One of the things I’ve discovered is that research is nothing but decisions, decisions, decisions. In fact I don’t even like to go to restaurants and get hit with a menu because it’s like, “I’ve been making decisions all day. Now I’ve got to make more decisions? What kind of psychological vacation is that?”

It’s one thing when you make all the decisions yourself because it’s your research, it’s your data, but now when every decision is a collaborative decision, that’s challenging. “How are we going to analyze the data? Are we going to treat this as simple as - are we going to treat this as a continuous variable or a categorical variable? We going to control for this? We going to control for that? Are we going to do this?” I mean, it’s endless.

So there have to be, for every set of papers or analytic questions, there have to be some leaders and some followers either defined or just emerging. But even then that doesn’t solve the problem because fundamentally results will come out unless it’s a randomized clinical trial and you just get a crisp yes/no answer to a crisp yes/no question. There’s going to be interpretation. What kind of spin do you put on it? Is the glass half empty or is the glass half full? Is that a small effect, a medium effect, or a big effect? Well if you’re in favor of it, it’s not a small effect. If you’re against it, it’s anything but - of course it’s a small effect even though it’s the same effect. People have vested interests.

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