Associational versus correlational research study design and data analysis

Scientific human psychology (SHP) is an international public enterprise responsible for promoting the optimization of humanity’s experienced quality of life by means of the various psychological crafts, such as parenting, teaching, supervising; winning a debate or election, achieving a good enough sale or purchase, benefitting oneself by threatening, taunting, seducing or by protecting oneself through avoiding, escaping, or counteracting threats, taunts, seduction, entrapment; meditating, praying, exercising. Etc. Optimizing their practice for achieving this requires a research methodology that most cost-effectively facilitates doing so and therefore requires centrally coordinated programmatic research devoted to fully enough dimensionally specifying each of these crafts and their effects and to validly measuring on all these dimensions. Linear model (covariational) statistics presume too much about how causes and effects are inter-related to rely on for adequately informing such research, so SHP needs a less presumptive and more data sensitive form of study design and data analysis, the associational model.