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PDF, English - main document Download (117kB) | Lizenz: PsyCuraDat: The development of a user-friendly curation standard for psychological research data by Blask, Katarina ; Müller, Marie-Luise ; Latz, Marc ; Arnold, Valentin ; Kraffert, Stephanie underlies the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

Abstract

Sharing research data in order to enable research synthesis, re-analysis or other methods of secondary data use are central for the ever-growing open science movement. In the context of replication crisis and ongoing efforts towards greater research integrity and standardization, this is particularly true for psychological science. Even though standards exist they are often tailored to the needs of the more data-intensive sub disciplines, scarcely used, and remain largely unknown to a more general population of researchers. To address these issues presented project aims at the empirically driven development of a discipline-specific standard that does not only facilitate curation and reuse of psychological research data, but is also representative for all sub-disciplines. Initial steps were concerned with aggregating existing standards, gauging their potential as enablers for psychological research curation, as well as first studies querying the nature of necessary information and as to how existing standards meet those requirements. Based on these findings, we developed a content specification for a curation standard that embraces three levels reflecting the central decisions in a prototypical research process, namely the description of the research design on a construct level and an operational level, as well as detailed description of the data collection and analysis process. The first documentation level represents, for instance, researchers’ decision on the concrete hypotheses, inclusion/exclusion criteria and the number of measurement points as well as a conceptual presentation of all substantial variables included in the design. On the second level these variables are described within an extended codebook. The codebook includes besides the rather classical information of a given variable’s name, label and value range also information on the procedure or paradigm with which it has been realized during the data collection process. Finally, the third level includes all materials, data preparation and analyses scripts as well as a detailed procedure graphic that allows the data user to link the information from all three documentation levels. The prototype will be discussed regarding its potential to further data sharing practices in psychology.