Over the past decade, psychology has undergone a credibility revolution (Angrist and Pischke, 2010) that stimulated development of open science practices for making our research more transparent, verifiable, and accessible (see Vazire, 2018, for a review). As a result, psychology has become a strong disciplinary leader in open science; yet much more work remains to be done so that the psychological research community can be more fully informed and engaged. Although open science involves a wide range of activities, the focus of this article is on preregistration.
Preregistration is when a researcher specifies, and submits to a repository, all the important details related to research design and statistical analysis prior to beginning research. Although a preregistration can vary in its level of detail, it resembles the sort of proposals that many of you submitted in graduate school to your master’s thesis or dissertation committees, prior to conducting your research.
And like a proposal, the benefits of preregistration include allowing the researcher to plan more comprehensively at the beginning of a research project; to get feedback before investing the time and resources required to conduct the research; and to document which hypotheses were specified a priori versus which were more exploratory in nature. This last point is worth emphasizing: Preregistration helps everyone—including the researchers themselves—appreciate the distinction between the research as originally planned and how those plans changed. It is okay, and even natural, for preregistered plans to change as a function of the circumstances or additional feedback. It is also okay, and even encouraged, for researchers to engage in follow-up exploratory analyses. The point is to communicate clearly these distinctions as part of the research process.
A wide range of preregistration templates already exists, which accommodates a similarly wide range of psychological research allowing a researcher to preregister at varying levels of detail. For example, one such templateopens in new window asks eight simple questions (e.g., “What is the main question being asked or hypothesis being tested in this study?”) that helps researchers plan out and commit to the basic structure of their work. Repositories of other quantitative and qualitative preregistration templates can be found at the websites of the Open Science Frameworkopens in new window and the Leibniz Institute for Psychologyopens in new window. Being templates, these can be modified to fit a researcher’s own goals for preregistration. A common misconception is that preregistration is a prescriptive and restrictive process, when in fact it merely helps psychological researchers communicate how they plan their research projects.
As an international effort toward increasing psychology’s commitment to creating a stronger culture and practice of preregistration, a multi-society Preregistration Task Force* was formed, following the 2018 meeting of the German Psychological Society in Frankfurt, Germany. The task force is composed of members from the American Psychological Association, British Psychology Society (BPS), German Psychological Society, Leibniz Institute for Psychology, and Center for Open Science.
Overall, the Preregistration Task Force had the following goals:
- promote a strong culture of transparency through recommending the adoption of preregistration in psychology
- create a template for preregistration with enough detail that it could serve as a stage 1 manuscript (such as for registered reports)
- allow for a flexible level of preregistration detail with the template, so it can be adapted for many research uses
- provide resources for societies and editors regarding how to use preregistration for scholarly journals
Thus, the task force created a detailed preregistration template that benefited from the APA JARS Quantitative Research guidelines, as well as our comprehensive review of many other preregistration templates. The template itself is can be accessed online directlyopens in new window for its details, and soon it will be stored permanently in the Leibniz Institute for Psychology preregistration siteopens in new window. Notably, the template not only captures many of the details of research planning; it also serves an educational function for communicating best practices, such as fully documenting participant demographics (e.g., gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status), considering options for data sharing, specifying not only hypotheses but also exploratory research questions, and detailing how a researcher will handle missing data.
This quantitative research template was developed through an iterative process and received feedback from members belonging to the societies on the task force, as well as members from other psychological societies around the world, such as Brazilian Society of Psychology, Japanese Psychological Association, and Austrian Psychological Society.
The template was launched with a webinaropens in new window on October 27, 2020, featuring two keynote speakers: Simine Vazire of University of Melbourne, and E. J. Wagenmakers of University of Amsterdam. The webinaropens in new window was recorded and may be accessed for more information. We strongly encourage psychologists to try the template out in their own research, and please send us feedback. Plans for a template for qualitative research that complements the current one in its structure are currently underway.
*Preregistration Task Force members:
- American Psychological Association
Fred Oswald, Open Science and Methodology Committee member
Rose Sokol-Chang, publisher, APA Journals and Books
Amanda Clinton, director, APA International Affairs - British Psychological Society
Daryl O'Connor, chair of the BPS Research Board
Lisa Coulthard, head of Research and Impact - German Psychological Society
Christian Fiebach, secretary and Open Science Committee member - Leibniz Institute for Psychology
Michael Bosnjak, director
Stefanie Müller, head of study planning, data collection, and data analysis services
Camila Azúa, research assistant - Center for Open Science
David Mellor, director, Policy Initiatives
References
Angrist, J. D., and Pischke, J.-S. (2010). The credibility revolution in empirical economics: How better research design is taking the con out of econometrics. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 24, 3-30. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.24.2.3opens in new window
Vazire, S. (2018). Implications of the credibility revolution for productivity, creativity, and progress. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13, 411-417. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691617751884opens in new window
