Exploring Pre-registration and Pre-analysis Plans for Qualitative Inference

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Abstract

In recent years, the discipline of political science has experienced demands and moves toward greater research transparency. While in quantitative research increased transparency through replication has become a fairly accepted convention, in qualitative political science, the debate over whether and how to practice transparency is on-going. The practical tools and guidelines put forward to increase reliability of qualitative work so far emphasize a later stage of research, i.e. the phase of data analysis and sharing transcripts. To complement these suggestions, in this paper we explore how pre-registration and pre-analysis plans – as more recently introduced in experimental social science – can foster production transparency and analytic transparency in qualitative research. We argue that a “qualitative version” of pre-registration and PAPs can potentially incorporate a variety of approaches to inference.We discuss the general benefits and costs of such tools, and how they could inform qualitative research.Then, we provide a pre-registration template for such purposes.