Research Design & Pre‑Registration

This resource helps you design rigorous, reproducible studies and formally pre-register them so your findings are clearer, less biased, and more useful for real decisions.

Why pre-registration matters

Good discovery and innovation depend on reliable evidence. Pre-registration makes your intentions explicit—what you expect to test, how you'll collect data, and exactly how you'll analyze it—before results can influence your decisions. That clarity helps teams avoid common pitfalls such as HARKing (hypothesizing after results are known), p‑hacking, and selective reporting, and makes your outcomes easier to interpret, compare, and reuse.

What you'll understand and be able to do

Using the materials here you will: articulate precise research questions and primary outcomes; specify sampling, recruitment, and power considerations; define data collection and cleaning rules; choose and document analysis methods and stopping rules; record inclusion/exclusion criteria and ethical approvals; and create a time-stamped pre-registration record you can refer to when reporting results.

Who benefits

Practical for anyone running experiments or evidence-gathering work: product teams testing new features, service businesses evaluating customer interventions, healthcare and public health pilots, academic and practitioner researchers, nonprofits measuring program impact, and manufacturing teams testing process changes. Templates scale to small pilots and larger registered studies—tailor them to fit your context and risk profile.

What's included and how to use it

This resource contains an Experiment Plan Template and a Research Design & Pre‑Registration Protocol you can copy and adapt. Start by drafting the plan before collecting data, then pre-register the key elements so confirmatory and exploratory analyses are clearly separated. If you use this platform's interactive forms, you can render templates as fillable checklists and save submissions as structured JSON for traceability and reuse. If you acquire or adapt these templates into an organizational domain, treat them as living artifacts that teams can tailor while preserving core fields that support reproducibility.

Typical pre-registration fields to complete: research question(s); primary and secondary outcomes; hypotheses; sampling frame and sample size justification; recruitment and consent procedures; data collection instruments; preprocessing and exclusion rules; planned statistical or qualitative analyses; stopping rules; timelines; and ethical approvals or risk mitigations.

Note: pre-registration clarifies confirmatory analysis but does not replace ethical review or domain-specific regulatory requirements—consult appropriate ethics boards, compliance officers, or subject-matter experts as needed.