Reproducible Social Science Research: Why and How

The objective of this workshop is to provide participants with an overview of the rationale for why funders, investigators, students, and practitioners of social science research should aim to make their research transparent and fully reproducible. The goal is for participants to leave the workshop with a strong grasp of why adopting transparent and reproducible research practices is important throughout the research life cycle, and with some hands-on experience with the tools to do so. Workshop participants will be provided with:

• An introductory, high-level overview of what it means to engage in reproducible research;
• Guidance on how to create a management plan for a research project and a structured workspace for the project that facilitates a reproducible workflow;
• A discussion of pre-registration and pre-analysis plans for both experimental and observational research designs;
• An introduction to version control and dynamic documents; and
• Tools and guidance for how to ethically and responsible share the outputs of a research project, including data, code, and research reports.

The workshop will be conducted using both R and Stata, but will focus on general practices and core principles that can be adapted to any software platform. There are no prerequisites, although basic familiarity with statistical software and coding would be helpful. Participants should bring their own laptop with either R + RStudio or Stata installed so that they can follow along and take full advantage of the hands-on exercises.

Presenters include:

Sam Harper, McGill University, https://sbh4th.github.io