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

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.