Mar 10, 2016  |  Lusaka, Zambia

Transparency + Reproducibility Workshop

This workshop aims to improve understanding of the current literature on challenges in the quality of social science research, and to teach the latest techniques for developing a reproducible workflow.The social science research community is increasingly emphasizing research transparency and reproducibility as essential components of high quality research, particularly research that is intended to inform program and policy decisions such as impact evaluations. There are currently several suggested best practices in research transparency, including: pre-registering studies (such as with ClinicalTrials.gov or the AEA registry), developing and publishing pre-analysis plans (PAPs), following standard reporting guidelines, publicly sharing data and underlying code, and other practices that enable not only reproducible research, but also reproducible results.

In light of this growing awareness across the social sciences, and following the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s (MCC) efforts to establish the Evaluation Catalog and initiatives like the Open Data Challenge, MCC and its country counterparts recognize the need to ensure evaluation efforts produce transparent and reproducible research.

Audience

This seminar is expected to target 7-10 professionals working at or with MCA Zambia on Compact activities, including: (i) MCA M&E staff, (ii) Innovation Grant Facility staff, (iii) independent evaluators (American Institute for Research and CDC), and other MCA staff.

Objectives

  1. Improve understanding of current literature on challenges in quality of social science research: publication bias, researcher bias and motivated reasoning, reproducibility, and data privacy issues.
  2. Improve understanding of techniques for reproducible workflow. This includes and introduction on how to transparently manage study materials and data/code using version control such as Github, Open Science Framework, and Dataverse.