Negative Results, Positive Contributions: Selection biases and the necessities of looking to the spaces between…

Summary

A recent study illuminated the bias toward publishing significantly positive results by researchers in the social sciences, raising substantive questions regarding the treatment and dissemination of null or statistically non-significant data. In archaeology, we also tend towards emphasizing the latest discovery, the big site, or the conclusive analysis. While it is satisfying to be able to present the latest and greatest in one’s field, what then becomes of the rest of the data? Typically, these are relegated to summary tables, supplementary technical reports, or cursory discussions of miscellany that note how the rest of the data support or relate to the "big find". The preferential bias towards positive significance, however, generates both analytical and interpretive self-selection biases in our archaeological understandings. Null data sets play an absolutely critical role in the inferential methods of spatial, quantitative, and archaeometric analyses. In addition, null or negative results can provide epistemic boundaries on the evaluation of interpretation and theory.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

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