Several times, I tried to get a replication project funded. Every time, reviews came back with a the same results: a worthwhile idea, but not feasible. Often the concern were the costs, other times the sample size we ...
I guess every social scientist at one point has been confronted with a quite common dilemma: We know that we would need a quite large number of items to assess a certain latent concept comprehensively and validly, but...
“The power of a statistical test is the probability that it will yield statistically significant results. Since statistical significance is so earnestly sought and devoutly wished for by behavioral scientists, one wou...
I am excited to announce that I am the new managing director of the Digital Media and Behavior Lab, which was officially launched this Monday, the 12th February 2024! Embedded in the faculty of social sciences of the ...
Over the last two decades, privacy has been a staple topic in communication science and other disciplines. Particularly since the advent of social media, privacy and self-disclosure processes have been central to many...
I am excited to share that I was recently awarded a VENI innovation grant by the Dutch Research Council (Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek; NWO). Building on my previous work on social contagion ...
This post provides an introduction to fitting item response theory (IRT) models in R. From my experience, most scholars in the social sciences have heard about IRT as an alternative to classical test theory (and its m...
From my personal point of view, becoming a researcher and succeeding in a PhD program can be one of the most rewarding experiences you will have in your life. You will have a lot of freedom in deciding who you want be...
The comparative privacy research network is organizing a preconference before the annual conference of the International Communication Association on May, 25th (9:30 to 17:00). Drawing on previous and ongoing conversa...
The Comparative Privacy Research Network is organizing a workshop on issues related to comparing fuzzy concepts like love, trust, and privacy across various structural settings (including, but not limited to cultures)...
With more and more communication scholars adopting open science principles (e.g., preregistration, sharing of data, material, and code), also more and more media and communication journals adopt open science features ...
I am excited to share that I accepted a position as assistant professor at the Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam in the Department of Communication Science. I am thrilled to become a member of this great department an...
Current debates on online privacy are often rooted in liberal theory. Privacy is hence often understood as a form of freedom from social, economic, and institutional influences. Such a negative perspective on privacy,...
In the last 10 years, many canonical findings in the social sciences appear unreliable. This so-called “replication crisis” has spurred calls for open science practices, which aim to increase the reproducibility, repl...
A few weeks or months from now, we could have a Covid-19 test kit sent to our home. Similar to a blood sugar test for diabetics, we would prick our finger, wait for a couple of minutes, and we will know whether we are...
With the news going crazy these days, I felt like there is one particularly thing that is often misunderstood. The corona virus spreads exponentially (without intervention or measures). The problem is that we – as hum...
Computing a priori power analyses for simple statistical models can be done analytically (e.g., with G*Power or the pwr package in R). However, estimating the power for more complex models and in particular structural...
In the last month, Michael Scharkow and I have worked on a new R-package called specr. The goal was to facilitate specification curve analyses (also called multiverse analyses). The idea behind a specification curve a...
I am excited to share with you that I started a post-doc position at the Department of Communication at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. Moving back to Mainz is exciting and a bit nostalgic too since I star...
In recent years, online privacy literacy has often been regarded as a potential solution to people’s seemingly paradoxical behaviors in online environments. Based on empirical findings that Internet users rarely imple...
When a year comes to an end, many blogger seem to have this urge to do one of these “Best of 2018” posts. The blogosphere is full of lists, thoughts, personal accomplishments and idiosyncratic meditations and resoluti...
I recently gave a workshop on data visualization. One of the topics was visualizing interaction effects (or “moderation” analyses). I think it is a great topic because it exemplifies quite well that there is not one s...
I finally can say that I published my dissertation. Although my defense was already in December, it took some time to wrap everything up and get the book published. But what did I actually write about? Using both a th...
Have you ever thought about centering your variables before running an regression based analysis? From my personal experiences, chances are high are that you haven’t: Although a useful data transformation procedure fo...
If you have ever been on this website before, you might realize that the design changed slightly and some new contents appear on a couple of sites. Yes, I did move to wordpress. Although it was great fun to create thi...
