Use: print on A4 paper at 100%, cut along the dashed borders, and give the cards to teams. The small labels (A1–A7) help you match objections with replies.
Objection cards
Print these cards, cut them out, and hand one or more objection cards to each team.
But…A1
… preregistration keeps me from conducting exploratory research!
But…A2
… preregistration takes so much time!
But…A3
… someone will steal my ideas!
But…A4
… what if I (or my students) make mistakes in the preregistration?
But…A5
… someone could preregister multiple hypotheses and take the preregistration that fits the data best!
But…A6
… people preregister stuff and then deviate significantly from the preregistration. What is it good for then?
But…A7
… I am doing qualitative research and none of the quantitative templates fits my way of working!?
Reply cards
These can be used as answer cards, instructor cards, or a separate matching set.
ReplyA1
- Improving your confirmatory research does not mean that you have to refrain from doing exploratory research.
- You can also preregister your exploratory research (e.g., planned analysis methods).
ReplyA2
- Actually it might even save you time during data analysis and interpretation.
- Preregistration mostly changes the order of the research process (e.g., think about how to analyze your data before rather than after you collect them).
ReplyA3
- On the contrary, by preregistering your ideas you mark them as yours.
- If anyone still dares to steal them, it becomes much easier to point this out as scientific misconduct.
- On some repositories (e.g., OSF), you can put an embargo on the preregistration so that it is not publicly visible for up to four years.
ReplyA4
- Everyone makes mistakes, so there is no need to be embarrassed.
- You can always deviate from your preregistered analysis if you provide a good justification.
- If your preregistration is open and someone finds a mistake, that can save you from discovering it too late.
ReplyA5
- That would be relatively easy-to-spot scientific misconduct compared with not-so-easy-to-spot HARKing without preregistration.
- If more than one hypothesis is preregistered, you would need a lot of luck to have a “perfect-fit” preregistration.
ReplyA6
- As a reviewer, it should make you more vigilant about the quality of the paper and lead you to require justifications for deviations from the preregistration.
- As a reader, you can better judge the quality of the results by seeing whether they come from confirmatory or exploratory research.
- It helps you spot questionable research practices.
ReplyA7
- The fact that existing templates do not fit perfectly does not mean that you cannot conduct a preregistration.
- Try to explain: What are your hypotheses? How do you want to investigate them? What will your data look like? How do you plan to evaluate the data?
- If you minimize degrees of freedom, you have met the core goal.
