OTF: Mapping out the Garden of Forking Paths: Creating a customizable pre-registration template that helps us identify the critical crossroads
Pre-registration is supposed to help us navigate the garden of forking paths and add the right constraints on which turns to make or avoid. There is value in pre-registration not only for strictly confirmatory research, but also (or especially so) for exploratory research, re-analyses of existing data, machine learning projects, and qualitative research. Many templates exist trying to address the varying needs of such study designs (e.g., ""post-registration templates""), but what we feel is missing is some more instructive guidance on the respective ""intentions behind the rules"" each template tries to address. As a result, many published pre-registrations read more like a defensive justification of a study's limitations, instead of a productive attempt to identify and control the most important threats to validity of a given design, or they remain vague to a degree that they are completely uninformative. In this hackathon, we will review existing pre-registration templates and map out the various forking paths they focus on. Next, we will create a big-picture guide for researchers to identify what researcher degrees of freedom are important to control given their specific study design, destination, and starting point, and provide a mix-and match customisable pre-registration template that helps them focus on what information is relevant to provide.