Study protocol and preregistration

Openness Movements
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Hello! I have a question about study protocol and preregistration. I’m about to register my study protocol but should I also pre-register my project? Grateful for input! Sincerely, Emma Bolund Lauenstein

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Hi @EmmaBolundLauenstein, welcome to the forum! :wave:

Can you please define “project”? Does the project include several studies? Would you need results from the first study or studies to plan the latter?

And ping @antonio.schettino who is a great resource on this.

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Hi Rebecca! Thank you for responding! Sorry for being unclear. My “project” is my thesis project (with Malin Hildebrand Karlén as my supervisor! :)) and the plan is for three different sub-studys that doesn’t need results from each other to be carried out.

All the best!

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I see! I would say that it isn’t necessary to preregister the whole project at the same time, but you would probably gain a lot from at least preparing detailed preregistrations for all three studies already from the start, because that way you would be able to early on identify potential weaknesses in the methodology that you might want to adjust. It isn’t uncommon to say in hindsight “oh if only I had known for Study 1 what I learned when doing Study 2”. By planning all of them very thoroughly from start one can hopefully make all three studies much stronger.

However, I probably wouldn’t publish the preregistrations for Studies 2 and 3 until before their data collections, because it’s quite likely that you still will want to make some last minute changes and improvements.

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Thanks for pinging me (and for the nice words), @rebecca :slight_smile:

@EmmaBolundLauenstein, congrats on preregistering your thesis work! Out of curiosity, is it for BA, MSc, or PhD?

I have very little to add to what @rebecca has already recommended. In a short document I prepared for a research institute in Rotterdam, I point interested researchers to ready-made templates as well as post-study checklists, to facilitate the comparison between preregistered plans and final report. I hope this information is useful… good luck!

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Hi, and thank you for sharing! I’m a clinical psychologist but my affiliation is with a medical institute so it’s for a MD.

Take care! /emma

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