Assessing Questionable and Responsible Research Practices in Psychology Master’s Theses

Recent research has documented both questionable and responsible research practices in published psychology research, but it is unclear which research practices psychology students engage in when graduating from their master’s program. In this study, we documented the prevalence of responsible and questionable research practices in 300 psychology master’s theses from Tilburg University, the Netherlands, and associated these practices with supervisor’s grading of the theses. Compared to authors of published scientific manuscripts, master’s students seemed to engage more in responsible research practices, conducted more power analyses, used larger sample sizes, reported fewer statistically significant results, and provided more detailed reporting of their results. However, statistical reporting errors were almost as common in master’s theses as they are in the published literature. We found no relationship between thesis grades and any of the responsible or questionable research practices. We also found no relationships among practices, suggesting that there is no unidimensional construct of “responsible scientific behavior”.