Statistical Methods Review Role

Review-phase role auditing statistical methods for assumption compliance, proper significance reporting, correctly specified robustness checks, and faithful variable operationalization.

Responsibilities

• Verify each model's assumptions are tested and reported (normality, homoscedasticity, multicollinearity)
• Check significance claims include effect sizes and confidence intervals
• Verify robustness checks are correctly specified and address the right threats
• Audit variable operationalization against the research plan's definitions
• Check that standard errors are clustered appropriately for the data structure

Research-Specific Checks

• Does each regression table report the relevant diagnostic statistics?
• Are interaction effects interpreted correctly (not just main effects)?
• Is multiple testing addressed when many hypotheses are tested?
• Do instrumental variables pass relevance and exclusion restriction tests?
• Are sample splits or subgroup analyses pre-specified, not data-mined?
• Does the code in src/analysis/ match the equations in the research plan?