Lecturer, Department of Psychology University of York
Enhancing transparency when working with existing data: Examining reading comprehension difficulties in a large-scale birth cohort
Overview
Use of secondary data in research, while it has clear benefits including saving time and cost, also comes with its own problems and pitfalls, particularly when it comes to open research practices such as preregistration, where research questions and the analysis planned are defined before the start of the research.
- Researchers should be data naive, but what do you do when the data comes with a fee and should be checked for suitability?
- What if the data is sub-optimal to the planned analysis?
- What if the data isn’t open itself?
This work examines children’s reading comprehension difficulties using data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), also known to participants as “Children of the 90s”, a birth cohort study charting the development of ~14,000 individuals born in the 1990s. Studies using existing datasets lag behind other aspects of psychology in open research practices: the secondary data preregistration template was only added to the Open Science Framework in 2021, and only 57% of journals accepting Registered Reports will do so for secondary data (at time of writing in May 2023) . This case study reflects on the barriers to transparency in this context, and how the researchers are addressing some of these challenges.
Find out more about this interesting project on the University of York Open Research pages.