Now What?: I’ve Found Nothing

1. Now What?: I’ve Found Nothing Steve Werner Department of Management Bauer College of Business University of Houston

2. Overview • So What? • Re-evaluate your data • Re-evaluate your measures • Re-evaluate your analyses • Re-evaluate your sample • Re-evaluate your study design • Re-evaluate your hypotheses • Re-evaluate your theory • Conclusion

3. So What? • Publication bias against no results. • Something’s wrong. • Bias against null hypotheses (well-deserved).

4. Re-evaluate Your Data • Look for entry errors. • Look for non-normality. • Look for outliers. • Look for excessive missing data. • Look for suspicious patterns.

5. Re-evaluate Your Measures • Look at reliability: a. errors in reverse scoring. b. bad items. c. too few items. • Look at the dimensionality of the measure. • Look at combining measures. • Look at difference score measures. • Look at single item measures. • Consider new measures, variables, and constructs.

6. Re-evaluate Your Analyses • Over-specified model? • Under-specified model? • Suppressor variables? • Multi-collinearity? • Consider different techniques.

7. Re-evaluate Your Sample • Look at sub-samples. • Range restriction? • Consider increasing sample size.

8. Re-evaluate Your Study Design • Do a power analysis • Increase sample size • Relax alpha • 1-tailed significance tests • Any way to reduce error variance?

9. Re-evaluate Your Hypotheses • Consider rewording hypotheses to make testing easier. • Consider moderator hypotheses. • Eliminate main effect hypotheses. • Consider mediator hypotheses.

10. Re-evaluate Your Theory • Consider theory boundaries. • Consider alternative theories. • Consider theory limitations.

11. Conclusion • So What? • Re-evaluate your data • Re-evaluate your measures • Re-evaluate your analyses • Re-evaluate your sample • Re-evaluate your study design • Re-evaluate your hypotheses • Re-evaluate your theory • Conclusion