Putting the Self in Self-Correction: Findings From the Loss-of-Confidence Project

R425 first year student nurses 'experience of encounters with death of a patient during clinical placement

BACKGROUND

In the course of caring, nurses often experience the death of patients, and this experience has an effect on the nurse. Every nurse responds to this experience in a different way, and it can be either a negative emotional response, or a positive emotional response. As part of their curriculum, R425 first-year student nurses are placed in clinical facilities to acquire competency in nursing skills, and here they may be exposed to patients dying. R425 is a South African Nursing Council regulation relating to the approval of and the minimum requirements for the education and training of a nurse (General, Psychiatric, and Community) and Midwife, leading to registration. End-of-life care can be rewarding, yet emotionally and psychologically challenging. Little is known about R425 first-year student nurses' experiences of patients dying while being cared for by nurses on clinical placement. The study, therefore, explored and describes R425 first-year student nurses' experiences of the death of a patient during clinical placement.

METHOD

A qualitative exploratory descriptive and contextual research design was adopted, and a purposive, nonprobability sampling approach applied. Data were collected through unstructured individual interviews with 15 R425 first-year student nurses. Data were analysed using content analysis.

RESULTS

Four themes emerged, namely, knowledge, psychological trauma, low self-esteem, and nutritional disorders, and subthemes were identified. Results reveal both negative and positive responses to encountering the death of patients, with more negative responses, and fewer positive responses.

CONCLUSION

Results show that first-year student nurses struggle to cope with the death of a patient, mainly because they lack knowledge and the skills required to provide end-of-life nursing. It is the requirement for student nurses to be competent in a skill, 'last office', which involves laying out of a dead person. Such skill can be deferred in the first year of study, and can only be introduced at a later stage, either in third year or fourth year of study, when students are better equipped with knowledge and skills relating to dealing with death. There is a need to review the curriculum of R425 first-year student nurses, so that outcomes such as death and dying can be introduced in the third or fourth year of study.

Evidence of questionable research practices in clinical prediction models

BACKGROUND

Clinical prediction models are widely used in health and medical research. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) is a frequently used estimate to describe the discriminatory ability of a clinical prediction model. The AUC is often interpreted relative to thresholds, with "good" or "excellent" models defined at 0.7, 0.8 or 0.9. These thresholds may create targets that result in "hacking", where researchers are motivated to re-analyse their data until they achieve a "good" result.

METHODS

We extracted AUC values from PubMed abstracts to look for evidence of hacking. We used histograms of the AUC values in bins of size 0.01 and compared the observed distribution to a smooth distribution from a spline.

RESULTS

The distribution of 306,888 AUC values showed clear excesses above the thresholds of 0.7, 0.8 and 0.9 and shortfalls below the thresholds.

CONCLUSIONS

The AUCs for some models are over-inflated, which risks exposing patients to sub-optimal clinical decision-making. Greater modelling transparency is needed, including published protocols, and data and code sharing.

Are female scientists underrepresented in self-retractions for honest error?

Retractions are among the effective measures to strengthen the self-correction of science and the quality of the literature. When it comes to self-retractions for honest errors, exposing one's own failures is not a trivial matter for researchers. However, self-correcting data, results and/or conclusions has increasingly been perceived as a good research practice, although rewarding such practice challenges traditional models of research assessment. In this context, it is timely to investigate who have self-retracted for honest error in terms of country, field, and gender. We show results on these three factors, focusing on gender, as data are scarce on the representation of female scientists in efforts to set the research record straight. We collected 3,822 retraction records, including research articles, review papers, meta-analyses, and letters under the category "error" from the Retraction Watch Database for the 2010-2021 period. We screened the dataset collected for research articles (2,906) and then excluded retractions by publishers, editors, or third parties, and those mentioning any investigation issues. We analyzed the content of each retraction manually to include only those indicating that they were requested by authors and attributed solely to unintended mistakes. We categorized the records according to country, field, and gender, after selecting research articles with a sole corresponding author. Gender was predicted using Genderize, at a 90% probability threshold for the final sample (n = 281). Our results show that female scientists account for 25% of self-retractions for honest error, with the highest share for women affiliated with US institutions.

Error tight: Exercises for lab groups to prevent research mistakes

Scientists, being human, make mistakes. We transcribe things incorrectly, we make errors in our code, and we intend to do things and then forget. The consequences of errors in research may be as minor as wasted time and annoyance, but may be as severe as losing months of work or having to retract an article. The purpose of this tutorial is to help lab groups identify places in their research workflow where errors may occur and identify ways to avoid them. To do this, this article applies concepts from human factors research on how to create lab cultures and workflows that are intended to minimize errors. This article does not provide a one-size-fits-all set of guidelines for specific practices to use (e.g., one platform on which to backup data); instead, it gives examples of ways that mistakes can occur in research along with recommendations for systems that avoid and detect them. This tutorial is intended to be used as a discussion prompt prior to a lab meeting to help researchers reflect on their own processes and implement safeguards to avoid future errors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Amending the literature through version control

The ideal of self-correction in science is not well served by the current culture and system surrounding amendments to published literature. Here we describe our view of how amendments could and should work by drawing on the idea of an author-led version control system. We report a survey (n = 132) that highlights academics' dissatisfaction with the status quo and their support for such an alternative approach. Authors would include a link in their published manuscripts to an updatable website (e.g. a GitHub repository) that could be disseminated in the event of any amendment. Such a system is already in place for computer code and requires nothing but buy-in from the scientific community-a community that is already evolving towards open science frameworks. This would remove a number of frictions that discourage amendments leading to an improved scientific literature and a healthier academic climate.

Smart Textile Sock System for Athletes’ Self-Correction during Functional Tasks: Formative Usability Evaluation

(1) Background: The development of a lightweight, easy-to-use system that measures the foot’s plantar pressure is becoming an increasingly important area of research in physiotherapy. For further development of the smart sock system, a formative usability study was conducted, where the smart textile sock sensor system was used for self-correction during functional tasks; (2) Methods: Five athletes from the football school participated in the formative usability study. Athletes performed pre-defined functional tasks for self-correction when interacting with the smart textile sock system. Formative usability evaluation methods: effectiveness (task success rate, error rate), efficiency (time-based), satisfaction evaluated by System Usability Scale (SUS); (3) Results: Formative usability indicators: task completeness effectiveness ranged from 40% to 100% in the first- and second-stage tasks. Completed task efficiency time: Stage 1, from 4.2 s (SD 1.3) to 88.8 s (SD 19.8); Stage 2, from 7.2 s (SD 1.9) to 9.6 s (SD 2.1). Satisfaction was assessed by the SUS system user group with 76 points (SD 7.42), which indicates “good” satisfaction; (4) Conclusions: formative usability indicators showed the need for technical improvements to the smart textile sock pressure sensor system. The SUS results indicate “good” satisfaction with the smart textile sock pressure sensor system and its application.

Aspiring to greater intellectual humility in science

The replication crisis in the social, behavioural and life sciences has spurred a reform movement aimed at increasing the credibility of scientific studies. Many of these credibility-enhancing reforms focus, appropriately, on specific research and publication practices. A less often mentioned aspect of credibility is the need for intellectual humility or being transparent about and owning the limitations of our work. Although intellectual humility is presented as a widely accepted scientific norm, we argue that current research practice does not incentivize intellectual humility. We provide a set of recommendations on how to increase intellectual humility in research articles and highlight the central role peer reviewers can play in incentivizing authors to foreground the flaws and uncertainty in their work, thus enabling full and transparent evaluation of the validity of research.

No harm in being self-corrective: Self-criticism and reform intentions increase researchers' epistemic trustworthiness and credibility in the eyes of the public

Science should be self-correcting. However, researchers often hesitate to admit errors and to adopt reforms in their own work. In two studies (overall N = 702), we test whether scientific self-criticism and reform intentions expressed by researchers damage or rather improve their reputation in the eyes of the public (i.e. perceivers). Across both studies, such self-correction (compared to no self-correction) increases perceivers' epistemic trustworthiness ascriptions, credibility perceptions, and willingness to further engage with science. Study 2 revealed that these effects were largely driven by the no self-criticism condition. In addition, researchers' commitment to implementing reforms had positive effects and rejecting reforms had negative effects on perceptions, irrespective of the extent of these reforms. These findings suggest that researchers' fear that self-criticism and expressing reform intentions may damage their reputation may be unfounded.

Psychological Science in the Wake of COVID-19: Social, Methodological, and Metascientific Considerations

The COVID-19 pandemic has extensively changed the state of psychological science from what research questions psychologists can ask to which methodologies psychologists can use to investigate them. In this article, we offer a perspective on how to optimize new research in the pandemic's wake. Because this pandemic is inherently a social phenomenon-an event that hinges on human-to-human contact-we focus on socially relevant subfields of psychology. We highlight specific psychological phenomena that have likely shifted as a result of the pandemic and discuss theoretical, methodological, and practical considerations of conducting research on these phenomena. After this discussion, we evaluate metascientific issues that have been amplified by the pandemic. We aim to demonstrate how theoretically grounded views on the COVID-19 pandemic can help make psychological science stronger-not weaker-in its wake.

The Tone Debate: Knowledge, Self, and Social Order

In the replication crisis in psychology, a “tone debate” has developed. It concerns the question of how to conduct scientific debate effectively and ethically. How should scientists give critique without unnecessarily damaging relations? The increasing use of Facebook and Twitter by researchers has made this issue especially pressing, as these social technologies have greatly expanded the possibilities for conversation between academics, but there is little formal control over the debate. In this article, we show that psychologists have tried to solve this issue with various codes of conduct, with an appeal to virtues such as humility, and with practices of self-transformation. We also show that the polemical style of debate, popular in many scientific communities, is itself being questioned by psychologists. Following Shapin and Schaffer’s analysis of the ethics of Robert Boyle’s experimental philosophy in the 17th century, we trace the connections between knowledge, social order, and subjectivity as they are debated and revised by present-day psychologists.

Objectivity for the research worker

In the last decade, many problematic cases of scientific conduct have been diagnosed; some of which involve outright fraud (e.g., Stapel, 2012) others are more subtle (e.g., supposed evidence of extrasensory perception; Bem, 2011). These and similar problems can be interpreted as caused by lack of scientific objectivity. The current philosophical theories of objectivity do not provide scientists with conceptualizations that can be effectively put into practice in remedying these issues. We propose a novel way of thinking about objectivity for individual scientists; a negative and dynamic approach.We provide a philosophical conceptualization of objectivity that is informed by empirical research. In particular, it is our intention to take the first steps in providing an empirically and methodologically informed inventory of factors that impair the scientific practice. The inventory will be compiled into a negative conceptualization (i.e., what is not objective), which could in principle be used by individual scientists to assess (deviations from) objectivity of scientific practice. We propose a preliminary outline of a usable and testable instrument for indicating the objectivity of scientific practice.

Tool Use Affects Spatial Perception

Tools do not just expand our capabilities. They change what we can do, and in doing so, they change who we are. Serena is Serena because of what she can do with a tennis racket. Tiger is Tiger because of what he can do with a golf club. In changing what we can do, tools also change the very way we perceive the spatial layout of the world. Objects beyond arm's reach appear closer when we wield a tool that can expand out to the object. Catchable objects seem to move faster when we wield a tool that is less effective for catching the object. These examples illustrate how the basic processes of spatial vision are impacted by tool use.