How Can Pre-Registering Your Study Promote Research Transparency?

September 6, 2022
| Kriti Jain, Marie Lawrence, Jenessa Malin
Transparency

For OPRE, transparency is very important. It’s one of ACF’s five research principles of rigor, relevance, transparency, independence, and ethics. To work towards greater transparency, here are some of the activities we already do (and, of course, there’s always more we can do):

Pre-registering your study, no matter what type it is (e.g., qualitative, secondary analysis), is an important part of transparency in research and evaluation. Pre-registering can also keep researchers and evaluators from overfitting to their data (that is, making decisions about data analyses and conclusions that are too specific to a particular sample or study) and using questionable practices like p-hacking, cherry picking results, or hypothesizing after results are known. Pre-registering helps with testing theories, too. In addition to the above, OPRE also practices:

Striving for greater transparency is a small part of a much larger movement in science, open science, which was precipitated by a need to grow trust in the scientific enterprise after issues like the replication crisis , or the idea that the results of many scientific studies can’t be reproduced. The Credibility Revolution video clip below describes this movement.

 

Kriti Jain is a Senior Social Science Research Analyst whose work at OPRE focuses on domestic/intimate partner violence, ongoing research methods training, healthy marriage, and responsible fatherhood.

Marie Lawrence is a Social Science Research Analyst whose work at OPRE focuses on improving family well-being through research and evaluation projects related to employment and training, child support, and the applications of behavioral science to human services.

Jenessa Malin is a Senior Social Science Research Analyst whose work at OPRE research and evaluation projects related to child welfare and early care and education programs.

Learn More About Our Staff

Next/Previous Posts