• Question: how can you prove that your research is reliable?

    Asked by emmawoods to Tim, Suzi, Damien, Rachael on 16 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by lidivampire, livmarshall, thedinosaurexpert.
    • Photo: Tim Fosker

      Tim Fosker answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      Hi @emmawoods

      Thanks for a great question! When you do experiments in a test tube you can easily check that your results are reliable by running the same experiment over and over again. Making sure the results you get from children are reliable is not so easy – we can’t ask the same 5 year-old to sit in a room having their brain activity measured over and over again for several days. Instead we use mathematics to calculate the chances of the results happening randomly. The more children we test that show the same patterns of brain activity the less likely the patterns we get are random. There is always a chance that our results are random, but we only report results when the chance of the results being random is small (usually less than 5 in 100).

      I hope that answers your question.

    • Photo: Suzi Gage

      Suzi Gage answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      Hi @emmawoods and @lidivampire
      I’ve answered this question already for someone else (they asked how we prove our results are accurate, but this is the same thing really). Here’s what I put:

      Thanks for your question, it’s a really good one.
      Often one study by itself may find something interesting, but if someone else cannot repeat this finding, it is probably only by chance, and not an interesting result. So we do what we call ‘replication’ and if a number of different people using different data can find the same result, then this suggests the result is accurate.

      Also, you can try to answer the same question with a different research method, if both methods lead to the same answer then this is a good sign that you’ve found something that is likely to be a true finding!

      Hope this answers your question 🙂

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