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.