Don't be unique - be random (from the start)

We all know, that the beautiful and brutal honesty of randomness is one of our most beloved (10/10 would randomize) key factors in the scientific approach of finding the truth. As an addition to the "HitchHARKers Guide to the Significance", I would like to introduce a new concept of conducting science. The ultimate solution and the shield against the sinister swinging sword of publish or perish is randomness. "I use that, I randomize everything in my sample! I even randomize my results!", some of you will maybe shout at the screen right now, but there is more. I say, why leave randomization exclusively to the sample? Why not implement it at the very beginning of your next (100%) publishable study? 

(to strengthen my argument, I will also use random quotes as headlines.) 

Coin village publisher!

See? It is that easy to create three random words. It is just as easy to create a theory, a hypothesis, a study and a result out of it. You don't believe it? Well, join the ride and become a well-known human being of the great century of publication. As a first step, we will use the Random Word Generator, a powerful tool to accompany us on our journey, to create a number of random words. What is your lucky number? Do you want the theory building process to be more challenging? Do you think about the number seven (well, now you do)? To break it down, you can easily choose any number between one and seven, but since this is a post about randomness, we will let a random number generator choose the number for us. Furthermore, random.org is delivering the real thing: a true random number, generated with some nice atmospheric noise. To get to the point, I got the number four. This will be the number of random words we use for creating our theory. Here is an almost random, but very enthusiastic gif:

Relax judge user. 

The thing about random words is, that we never know what we get. If you are working in biological sciences and you get a result like "gap, bible, tooth, flight", you have to tweak your way to a fitting theory. To simplify things, I will adjust my result to the field of Psychology or IO Psychology. Here it comes: 

"strip, innovation, cruel, summer"

Now we finally have something to work with! With a bit of word-juggling, my new theory could be that "Temperature (summer) has an effect on male cruelty towards female strippers" or that "Managerial cruelty is influencing innovation within teams". Give the wheel another spin and you could end up with something like: 

"reduction, difficulty, flash, printer"

Transform this into "The reduction of printers has an influence on the employee's perceived difficulty of work" and you have a fine setup for going deeper into your scientifically mind-cave. Before that, you can lean back and relax a bit, or just have a look at your colleague struggling to figure out about what to theorize next. Ah, truly amazing times. 

Screw, glow, seek. 

Well, the random headline above could be seen as some kind of wisdom for pickup-artists (please don't), but we take it as a start and we will now seek for similar studies, giving our theory a more robust basement to build on (and us less work to do). To make it even easier, we now generalize our theory to the limit, transforming printers into office equipment or even benefits (printers are important) and therefore changing our theory into "The reduction of benefits has an influence on the employee's perceived difficulty of work". There you go, from a silly printer (important, but still silly) to the nice and fruitful (love this word) phrase "benefit". Since we are using important directional words in our hypothesis or maybe even after we know the results, we could even leave out "The reduction of" and shorten it to "Benefits have an influence on the employee's perceived difficulty of work". Now take a moment and appreciate your own work, look in the mirror and scream "I AM SCIENCE". 

As mentioned before, it is now the time to do some 80s-training-montage worthy kind of library research. Grab your diet coke, turn your cap around and embrace the power of your keyboard. Essentially, you can use Google Scholar for that and then cherry pick your way through the displayed articles. Now, if you have found an article, matching your pace of doing research, take its references and refer as much as you can. A long reference list always makes a good first impression (especially to students, the longer the list of references, the more intimidating the article; also sometimes a pleasant surprise if you have to read 40 pages and it turns out, that the article has 20 pages of references). If you like the methods, take them as well. Definitely take the used questionnaires, they are always well known and established. The articles for this example are the following:

Lapierre, L. M., & Allen, T. D. (2006). Work-supportive family, family-supportive supervision, use of organizational benefits, and problem-focused coping: implications for work-family conflict and employee well-being. Journal of occupational health psychology, 11, 169.

They measure benefits via a shortened checklist of family-friendly benefits, using flexible working hours and working from home as the main benefits (Allen, 2001).

Nonose, K., Yoda, Y., Kanno, T., & Furuta, K. (2016). An exploratory study: A measure of workload associated with teamwork. Cognition, Technology & Work, 18, 351-360. 

There we have a nice definition and summary of the research on workload, as well as the development of a measurement. The exploratory aspect makes it even more sexy.

Alive surgeon, lonely. 

Now, just as the random surgeon, we have to stitch ourselves the perfect little study. Since we are probably working in a college environment, college students are the easiest to pick for our study. Make it beneficial or mandatory, let thankful grad students do the work for you (we have all been there) or just do it yourself. Taking the NASA-TLX (workload) and Allen's (2001) checklist for benefits, we only take students who a) either have worked before, or b) are working in a part-time job which allows flexibility, or even better c) they have to imagine how it would be to work on flexible working hours and from home. Of course, this aspect of imaginary reality has to get a reasonable explanation.

From now on, it will run down like water of a duck's back (weird). Following the steps mentioned in the HitchHARKers guide, you will make it to your publication in no time.

Some additional tweaks for scientists who are trapped in a remote location without internet and any students to question: simulate students with R. You might think that it is impossible to recreate a human being with a simple (yet powerful) programming language. Thankfully, you are right. What we can do is to simulate the student's answers to various questionnaires and even give them different patterns (personalities). But that will be a thing for the next post. Until then, I hope you find the random word generator to be a tool of creativity (or shenanigans).

Some references

Allen, T. D. (2001). Family-supportive work environments: The role of organizational perceptions. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 58, 414 – 435.