Mind the level: problems with two recent nation-level analyses in psychology

Frontiers in Psychology

Toon Kuppens¹ 

关键词: statistical analysis;    cross-cultural differences;    ecological fallacy;    environmental performance;    country age;    wealth;    religious beliefs;    meaning in life;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01110

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

First, the country-level analyses presented by OD and HBW violate the assumption of independent sampling (i.e., the statistical assumption of independence of errors) as countries are geographically (and historically) clustered (Ross and Homer, 1976; Pollet et al., 2014). This is also known as “Galton's problem.” Countries from the same region have undergone a similar development and cannot be considered independent data points. As a consequence, all significance tests are biased (Kruskal, 1988). This applies to OD, HBW, and many other nation-level analyses. We illustrate the consequences of Galton's problem with data from HBW. HBW presented results showing that country age was positively related with the Environmental Performance Index (EPI). The EPI consists of the subscales Environmental Health (EH) and Ecosystem Vitality (EV); Figure ​Figure11 clearly shows that the scores cluster by region.

【 授权许可】

CC BY