- Book
A better how: notes on developmental meta-research
Edited by Patrick S. Forscher and Mario Schmidt
- May 31, 2024
- 1:50 pm
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OVERVIEW
DOI: https://doi.org/10.62372/ISCI6112
The past decade has raised concerns about how research is conducted, evaluated, and disseminated. Fuelled by the replication crisis in psychology and allied disciplines, these concerns have spawned a movement that unites scholars from across the globe: the open science movement. The movement has produced and popularized a huge array of innovations to enhance the replicability of research and has even caught the notice of several large institutional actors. For example, the Biden administration declared 2023 the ‘year of open science’ in the United States. Internationally, UNESCO has collated and issued comprehensive recommendations for how member states can use and incorporate open science into policymaking. This interest has set in motion a broader movement and a dedicated academic subfield to improve how research is used in society. This movement, the meta-research movement, is the subject of this book.
Meta-research, sometimes called meta-science, is research focused on investigating the research process itself, often aiming to make concrete improvements. These improvements have, to date, primarily focused on improving the fundamental soundness of academic research. Due to its roots in the behavioral sciences, these improvements are also often behaviorally informed. For example, the meta-research innovation called “preregistration” involves a precommitment to a particular way of analyzing data before seeing it. This innovation is designed to reduce the risks that the analyst intentionally or unintentionally changes the analysis plan after seeing how the data turns out to suit their preferred interpretation. Although this innovation focuses on the basic soundness of research, the improvements sought by meta-researchers can, in principle, involve anything – including the problem areas that are the traditional focus of the global development community, such as north-south power differences, building healthy research ecosystems, and the treatment of participants or beneficiaries.
THEMATIC AREAS
Our team has spent the past two years investigating the potential intersections between meta-research and global development. We discovered that many communities within global development have already been concerned about how to improve how research is conducted and used without necessarily realizing that they have a common cause with other, similar communities. Likewise, many meta-researchers would benefit from learning how research is used outside academic contexts. We believe this intersection between meta-research and global development is a fruitful one and has the potential to constitute an entirely new subdiscipline, which we call developmental meta-research. This subdiscipline turns meta-research’s behaviorally-informed critical lens toward topics that have traditionally been the focus of global development practitioners. We believe the resulting subdiscipline can fruitfully inform intersections between development practitioners and meta-researchers and mobilize a new community around improving how research is done in development.
This volume brings together various contributors from across development and meta-research. These contributors span different sectors, institutions, countries, and problem areas. What unites them is a shared focus on improvement: in the distribution of power, how evidence is used to inform policy, and regarding the overall conduct of research.
Looking for a hardcopy, as opposed to a PDF download? Click here to buy “A Better how” from Amazon. You can also buy it within Kenya from Nuria store here.
