alt Hacker News> They just surveyed some college students and drew conclusions by running statistical analyses on the data until they got something that seemed significant.
Is this just cynicism or based on anything? From reading the methods section it doesn't appear this is what happened
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gs17 • yesterday at 7:36 PM
It does seem to be cynicism, they're convinced the authors "gave people surveys with a lot of questions and then tried to find correlations in the data", but nothing indicates they did more than the 9 questions (plus one more for sex as a control) the paper includes, and restricted it to only Mario/Yoshi players. Ten questions is pretty short.
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From the paper:
> Methods:
> We used a mixed methods approach. First, qualitative data were collected through 41 exploratory, in-depth interviews (women: n=19, 46.3%; men: n=21, 51.2%; prefer not to disclose sex: n=11, 2.4%; mean age 22.51, SD 1.52 years) with university students who had experience playing Super Mario Bros. or Yoshi. Second, quantitative data were collected in a cross-sectional survey…
So interviews with a biased sample (students with experience playing the game) and then a survey.
Also, try adding up those n= numbers. They don’t sum to 41. The abstract can’t even get basic math or proofreading right.
If the body of the paper describes something different than the abstract, that’s another problem
EDIT: Yes, I know the n=11 was supposed to be an n=1. Having a glaring and easily caught error in the abstract is not a good signal for the quality of a paper. This is on the level of an undergraduate paper-writing exercise, not a scientific study as people are assuming.