Researcher degrees of freedom is a concept referring to the inherent flexibility involved in the process of designing and conducting a scientific experiment, and in analyzing its results.
The term reflects the fact that researchers can choose between multiple ways of collecting and analyzing data, and these decisions can be made either arbitrarily or because they, unlike other possible choices, produce a positive and statistically significant result.
[1] The researcher degrees of freedom has positives such as affording the ability to look at nature from different angles, allowing new discoveries and hypotheses to be generated.
[9] It is also a potential explanation for p-hacking, as researchers have so many degrees of freedom to draw on, especially in the social and behavioral sciences.
Studies with smaller sample sizes are more susceptible to the biasing influence of researcher degrees of freedom.