We are hosting the second workshop from the series “Supporting a Positive Research Culture in Experimentation” funded by a UCD Research Culture ReCLAIM award. The workshop is organised by members of the BSP Group consisting of Diogo Geraldes, Margaret Samahita, Oana Peia, Marta Talevi, Yung-Shiang (Jasmine) Yang, Sinéad Flannery, Oscar Barrera-Rodríguez and Vessela Daskalova.

Workshop details:

Programme:
Session 1: Chair, Oana Peia, UCD School of Economics
10:15-10:30 Vessela Daskalova, UCD School of Economics
10:30-10:45 Deirdre Robertson, Behavioural Research Unit, Economic and Social Research Institute
10:45-11:00 James O’Mahony, UCD School of Economics
11:00–11:15 coffee break
Session 2: Chair, Marta Talevi, UCD School of Economics
11:15-11:30 Aiqing Ling, UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School
11:30-11:45 Lilia Wasserka- Zhurakhovska, J.E. Cairnes School of Business and Economics, University of Galway
11:45-12:00 Vitaliia Yaremko, Department of Economics, Trinity College Dublin
12:00–13:00 lunch
Session 3: Chair, Oscar Barrera-Rodríguez, UCD School of Politics and International Relations
13:00-13:15 Farsan Ghassim, UCD School of Politics and International Relations
13:15-13:30 Laura Taylor, UCD School of Psychology
13:30-13:45 Egle Gusciute, UCD School of Sociology
Project summary:

Experimentation is a crucial tool for research and collecting causal evidence in various fields such as economics, psychology, environmental science, agriculture, biology, medicine, and many others. Recent concerns about the trustworthiness and replicability of findings in various fields have highlighted that how we do experiments matters.

The goal of this proposal is to establish a positive and reflective research culture around experimentation. There are experts across different Schools in UCD for whom experimentation is an important part of research. However, we do not necessarily know much about the best practices of experimental researchers in other disciplines and often also of researchers using different types of experiments within a discipline (laboratory, field, online).

We will start a bottom-up discussion from an interdisciplinary group of researchers doing experimentation in order to support each other and learn from our experiences. The format will be through a series of 3 workshops in which we will discuss best practices for experimental research. The first two workshops will be UCD internal, the third one will feature invited speakers from abroad who are key figures from different disciplines in this debate. A positive and reflective research culture will raise questions around the role of pre-registration, replication, publication biases, ethics, pilot experiments, incentivization in experiments, interpretation of findings, reacting to challenges and learning from failures. A key objective of the proposal is to develop a positive and nurturing research environment for the next generation of researchers.