A network perspective on animal welfare
The scientific study of animal welfare involves measuring physiological, behavioural, and/or cognitive variables to infer the welfare state of animals. Such an approach implies these measures are indicators, or reflect, an unmeasured latent variable of welfare state. Drawing inspiration from recent developments in human psychology and psychiatry, in this paper we propose an alternative perspective […]
Zoo Research Guidelines: Statistics for typical zoo datasets
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In the deep end: pooling data and other statistical challenges of zoo and aquarium research
Abstract 10.1002/zoo.20089.abs Zoo and aquarium research presents many logistic challenges, including extremely small sample sizes and lack of independent data points, which lend themselves to the misuse of statistics. Pseudoreplication and pooling of data are two statistical problems common in research in the biological sciences. Although the prevalence of these and other statistical miscues have […]
Comparative Methods with Sampling Error and Within-Species Variation: Contrasts Revisited and Revised
Comparative methods analyses have usually assumed that the species phenotypes are the true means for those species. In most analyses, the actual values used are means of samples of modest size. The covariances of contrasts then involve both the covariance of evolutionary changes and a fraction of the within‐species phenotypic covariance, the fraction depending on […]
Application of Piecewise Hierarchical Linear Growth Modeling to the Study of Continuity in Behavioral Development of Baboons (Papio hamadryas)
In behavioral science, developmental discontinuities are thought to arise when the association between an outcome measure and the underlying process changes over time. Sudden changes in behavior across time are often taken to indicate that a reorganization in the outcome-process relationship may have occurred. The authors proposed in this article the use of piecewise hierarchical […]
Meta-analysis — a systematic and quantitative review of animal experiments to maximise the information derived
Meta-analysis provides a tool to statistically aggregate data from existing randomised controlled animal experiments. The results can then be summarised across a range of conditions and an increased pool of experimental data can be subjected to statistical analysis. New information can be derived, but most frequently the results are a refinement of existing knowledge. By […]
A farewell to Bonferroni: the problems of low statistical power and publication bias
Recently, Jennions and Møller (2003) carried out a meta analysis on statistical power in the field of behavioral ecology and animal behavior, reviewing 10 leading journals including Behavioral Ecology. Their results showed dismayingly low average statistical power. The statistical power of a null hypothesis significance test is the probability that the test will reject when […]
Using Principal Components and Factor Analysis in Animal Behaviour Research: Caveats and Guidelines
Principal component (PCA) and factor analysis (FA) are widely used in animal behaviour research. However, many authors automatically follow questionable practices implemented by default in general-purpose statistical software. Worse still, the results of such analyses in research reports typically omit many crucial details which may hamper their evaluation. This article provides simple non-technical guidelines for […]
What’s wrong with Bonferroni adjustments
When more than one statistical test is performed in analysing the data from a clinical study, some statisticians and journal editors demand that a more stringent criterion be used for “statistical significance” than the conventional P<0.05. Many well meaning researchers, eager for methodological rigour, comply without fully grasping what is at stake. Recently, adjustments for multiple […]
Genetics and evolution of function-valued traits: understanding environmentally responsive phenotypes
Many central questions in ecology and evolutionary biology require characterizing phenotypes that change with time and environmental conditions. Such traits are inherently functions, and new ‘function-valued’ methods use the order, spacing, and functional nature of the data typically ignored by traditional univariate and multivariate analyses. These rapidly developing methods account for the continuous change in […]