Preregistration activity
In the activity below, you will gain experience of the type of information you will need to provide when preregistering a research project. Please answer the questions based on one of your existing research projects, or a project you would like to do in the future.
Allow about 30 minutes
Activity 1.1:
What is your research project title?
When you are ready, press 'reveal' to see our comments.
Discussion
The title of your research project should, in ten to fifteen words, provide an informative description of the research being reported. When coming up with the title you might want to think about the variables, the design of the study, and the key findings of your research project.
Activity 1.2:
Who is contributing to this research?
When you are ready, press 'reveal' to see our comments.
Discussion
If you are collaborating with people on this research project, you can list their names and affiliations here. Declaring these provides contextual information about your research, and the academic perspectives the people in your team are likely to bring to it.
Activity 1.3:
This question concerns whether you have already collected data. There are three possible options: simply select the one that best describes the stage you are at with your research, provide further details, then click ‘reveal’ to see our comments.
Have any data been collected for this study already?
a) Yes, at least some data has been collected for the study already.
Discussion
You may need to explain how much exposure to the data you've had: the general rule of thumb is the less involvement you’ve had with the data, the better. However this does depend on your project, and preregistration can still protect you from questionable research practices, even if some data has already started to come in.
b) No, no data have been collected for the study already.
Discussion
Great! When you are preregistering, the general rule of thumb is the less involvement you’ve had with data, the better. That way, you won’t be tempted to add post hoc justifications after you’ve seen the results.
c) It’s complicated because we have already collected some data or are using secondary data.
Discussion
If you select this third option, you’ll need to explicitly state how, and to what capacity, you’ve been exposed to the data previously. When you are hoping to preregister, the general rule of thumb is the less involvement you’ve had with the data, the better, but a project that involves secondary data is a good example of how preregistration can still be valuable, even when a lot of data already exists.
Now let’s continue our walk through preregistration. The next question gets to the heart of the matter: what your research is about. You need to be clear and concise in your responses, so that when you return to your preregistration document, it will clearly encapsulate what your plans were at this point in time.
Activity 1.4:
What is the main question being asked, or hypothesis being tested in the study?
Use the text box below to record your research question. Here are some tips to help with your responses:
- Your research questions should be specific.
- If you have more than one hypothesis, you need to write multiple statements (one per hypothesis). It is helpful to write hypotheses in bulleted or numbered format: this forces you to be concise.
- If you are doing quantitative research, you should also state whether your hypothesis predicts a certain direction and if so what that direction is.
When you are ready, press 'reveal' to see our comments.
Discussion
Your response will vary according to your discipline and style of research. Try to ensure the research question or hypothesis is as focused as possible. Use simple language and avoid ambiguity. Here is an example:
Research question: Can we replicate the findings of Yoon, Johnson and Csibra [PNAS, 105, 36 (2008)] that nine-month-old infants retain qualitatively different information about novel objects in communicative and non-communicative contexts?
Hypothesis 1: In a communicative context (‘ostensive pointing’), infants will mentally process the identity of novel objects at the expense of mentally processing their location. We would expect longer looking times for changed objects than changed location.
Hypothesis 2: In a non-communicative context (‘non-ostensive reaching’), infants will mentally process the location of novel objects at the expense of encoding their identity. We would expect longer looking times to changed location than changed identity.
Next, you’ll be asked questions about the design of your study. The first of these questions relates to quantitative research. If your research is not quantitative, you may wish to skip to Activity 1.6.
These are some questions you might want to ask yourself when answering:
- What are your independent variables and your dependent variables?
- How do these variables relate to each other?
- How will they be measured (a self-scale report, a behavioural task)?
- What is your sample size and criteria?
- How did you determine your sample size?
- Do you have a ‘between’, ‘within’ or ‘mixed’ study design?
- Are you using counterbalancing?
Activity 1.5:
Describe the design, key variables, and sample, specifying how they will be measured and collected.
Use the text box below to identify exactly what your variables are. Then, reflect on why you think this information is important for preregistration.
When you are ready, press 'reveal' to see our comments.
Discussion
Your response will vary according to your discipline and style of research. Here’s one example:
Independent variable: Our study investigates two conditions: communicative (ostensive pointing) and non-communicative (ostensive reaching).
Dependent variable: Duration of first looks and total looking time, measured using a Tobij eye-tracker. We may also hand-code looking offline (blind) to increase confidence in our results.
Design: Previous research has only found a significant effect for duration of first look, so we only predict differences in this. However, we are still including total looking time: although previous research data were not significant for this variable, they appear to be in the predicted direction.
Measurement: Duration from first video frame when object is revealed to when infant first looks off-screen.
Sampling: We will run the study until twenty four infants that meet the criteria for the experiment have been tested. This will exclude excessive fussiness preventing completion of study or resulting in uncodable eye movement, experimenter and equipment error, caretaker interference, or infants looking off-screen.
If your research is qualitative, you will also be asked to specify exactly how you plan to conduct your research, although your answers are likely to be a little different.
For instance, you might be interested in the experience of parenting a child prodigy. How will you approach the task? With a questionnaire? An interview? A focus group? Open or closed questions? Or supposing you are interested in changes in depictions of families through the twentieth century. What evidence will you use? Newspapers and magazines? Archive photographs? How will you analyse them? Discourse analysis? Visual analysis?
Activity 1.6:
Describe the study design and how data will be sampled and collected.
Use the text box below to record your design and data collection plan. Here are some tips to help with your responses:
- What methodologies are you using, e.g.: case study, ethnography?
- What is your sampling, recruiting or case selection strategy?
- What type of data are you interested in, and what is your method for collecting or generating the data?
- You may also want to describe tools, instruments, plans or schedules (e.g.: interview schedule or archival search plan)?
- What criteria need to be reached in order to stop data collection or generation?
When you are ready, press 'reveal' to see our comments.
Discussion
Your response will vary according to your discipline and style of research. But asking yourself questions like this helps to focus on what you want to know, and how you will be exploring it. Here is one example [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] of a preregistered qualitative study.
We hope this activity helps you feel confident about your next preregistration. These questions have concentrated on your methodology plan, but you will also need to provide information about your analysis plans. We will explore the analysis stage in more detail next week.
How to approach preregistration