Research involving human subjects can pose complex ethical issues that require careful thought and consideration on the part of both researchers and participants.
Research Ethics
A pre-registration is a time-stamped research plan that researchers can create and upload before conducting a study. The objective of pre-registration is to provide researchers with an overview of ongoing studies in their field and to build research transparency by reducing selective reporting. While pre-registration is commonplace for clinical health trials, its use in development economics is more recent.
Before involving any human subject in a research study, the research team must obtain informed consent from each individual.
A pre-analysis plan (PAP) is a document produced at the design stage of an impact evaluation that sets out in advance how the researcher will analyze data. While the main objective of a PAP is to prevent data mining and specification searching, it can also help the researcher think through questionnaire design and, once data is collected, make data analysis much quicker and easier. This page will briefly summarize the pros and cons of a PAP, outline its elements, and provide additional resources.