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Category: Project

Description: Pre-registration of hypotheses has been heralded as a promising solution to improve transparency in science. Although there are well-known benefits for the scientific community in general, pre-registration is not advertised as a best-practice that leads to immediate individual benefits for researchers. One of the biggest immediate rewards of pre-registered studies is that they allow non-conventional research designs that are more efficient than conventional designs. Researchers who pre-register their study design and analysis strategy can profit from the immediate individual benefit of collecting data more efficiently by using sequential analyses and one-sided tests where useful and appropriate. This project consists of four work packages that explain to researchers what the benefits of sequential and/or one-sided designs can be in terms of efficiency, take away concerns about non-conventional designs by instigating a discussion about one-sided tests among researchers and statisticians, and asking whether editors of psychology journals will accept pre-registered sequential and/or one-sided analyses. Finally, I will examine whether researchers who are aware of these benefits are indeed more willing to pre-register their experiments.