Ze Freeman
Sessions
Clinical psychology is a field that has been slow to take up open science practices. The importance of rigour in this area is clear, with more transparent and replicable methods leading to greater trustworthiness of treatments. Metascience research in clinical psychology would help to establish whether research and patient outcomes are improved as a result of implementing these practices. However, it is unclear how best to assess the ways these practices could improve the quality of clinical psychological science. The uptake of open science practices may be limited by factors including competitive research funding and the challenges of recruitment, and measures of transparency may be hard to assess beyond other aspects of reporting on clinical trials. These practices have not yet been systematically measured in clinical psychology. This poster will highlight areas for metascientific study, as well as practices that may be promising for clinical psychologists to implement.
Funders and institutions have put increasing emphasis on researchers disseminating their findings to wider audiences via social media, popular science books, public-facing talks and other platforms. However, public understanding of science is impeded by poor communication of study findings, leading to misinformation and confusion. With this confusion comes pressure on policymakers to be guided by public sentiment rather than rigorous research findings, which may diverge in their conclusions.
In this Unconference, we want to lead a discussion about how the psychological research community can adapt its public engagement to a new era. Topics may include:
- The risks posed by the increased use of preprints;
- How to combat public misinterpretation of study findings;
- Ways to ensure that expert researchers are centred;
- The promotion of pseudopsychological content by influencers on social media and
- Direct threats against those who seek to highlight pseudoscientific misinformation in the public sphere.