Perspectives: replication is more than meets the eye

Abstract

Drawing on recent research and debates in social sciences, this paper situates replication in an advertising research context. We clarify the role of replication in the field and outline the challenges inherent in replication studies in advertising research. We further elaborate on how researchers should engage in replication research to increase the truth value of advertising research while overcoming the obstacles to replication research. Finally, we discuss how advertising scholars, reviewers, and editors can facilitate replication research to reduce the share of false-positive results and accumulate knowledge in the discipline. We see replication as critical in advertising research, given the high variability of experimental factors and the applied nature of the field. Therefore, a better understanding of replications and the challenges of advertising research should inspire scholars to engage in more replication attempts and reviewers and editors to consider it for publication.

Keywords:

• Methodology
• replication
• exact replication
• close replication
• constructive replication
• conceptual replication
• truth value

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Exact replication results are never definitive. There is always a risk that uncontrolled extraneous factors affect the experimental setting. However, despite this, most scholars regard exact replications as valid tests of false positives in the original study (Brandt et al. 2014; Crandall and Sherman 2016; Easley, Madden, and Dunn 2000; Hudson 2023; Nosek and Errington 2020).