Apr 14, 2017  –  Apr 15, 2017  | 

Research Transparency Workshop — Catalyst Workshop, University of Kinshasa

Catalyst: Zacharie Tsala Dimbuene

Research Transparency is gaining attention in the scientific community around the world, including the United States, European countries, and Anglophone countries in sub-Saharan Africa; yet the concept is quite a “new world” in Francophone Africa. In my efforts to advance the movement in Francophone Africa, I successfully delivered the first Research Transparency Workshop at the University of Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo). This workshop is intended to sustain previous efforts to set up “Research Transparency in Social Sciences” as a culture in the next generation of social scientists in Francophone Africa. 


Location: University of Kinshasa, DRC
Instructors: Zacharie Tsala Dimbuene

Description

The main goal of the workshop was to familiarize university social science researchers with transparency in teaching practices and research.

Specifically, the goals of the workshop were:
  • Familiarizing participants with the importance of reproducible research and research transparency (both for their own work as well as from a public good perspective)
  • Presenting concrete guidance and tools e.g. recommendations from IPA’s best practice manual for managing data/code, BITSS’ reproducible research handbook, Github, OpenScience Framework and Dataverse.
  • Providing an excellent setting with support for participants to practice new skills / tools, and to improve their own data/code from their projects.

Workshop activities included:

  • organizing file structure
  • creating understandable variable labels and value codes, as well as connecting variables to survey instruments through consistent labels and codebook creation
  • version control of code and data
  • creating and maintaining documentation files about the survey and data, as well as data cleaning steps.