Transparent and Reproducible Data Analysis

Abstract

There is increasing concern across a wide range of academic disciplines that empirical results cannot be reproduced because of a lack of transparency in the research process (Baker, 2016). Over the last decade there has been increasing anxiety that it is impossible to verify the results presented in many research papers (Christensen, Freese, & Miguel, 2019). There is a growing interest in the need for researchers to provide additional materials alongside traditional publications to enable other researchers to understand, evaluate and build upon previous research work. The purpose of these materials is to provide sufficient information for a third party, that is unconnected with the original work, to reproduce results without any additional information being provided by the original authors. The focus of this entry is social science research that employs statistical techniques to analyse observational data (e.g. social surveys). Many of the issues associated with undertaking transparent and reproducible data analysis pervade other forms of social science research (e.g. qualitative data analysis), despite the different nature of the data and the analytical techniques that are used.