  The replicability crisis has drawn attention to numerous weaknesses in
psychology and social science research practice. In this work we focus on three
issues that cannot be addressed with replication alone, and which deserve more
attention: Functional misspecification, structural misspecification, and
unreliable interpretation of results. We demonstrate a number of possible
consequences via simulation, and provide recommendations for researchers to
improve their research practice. Psychologists and social scientists should
engage with these areas of analytical and statistical improvement, as they have
the potential to seriously hinder scientific progress. Every research question
and hypothesis may present its own unique challenges, and it is only through an
awareness and understanding of varied statistical methods for predictive and
causal modeling, that researchers will have the tools with which to
appropriately address them.
