Designing a Study You Can Defend
Participant acceptability can determine whether a proposed intervention or research procedure is workable under realistic conditions. Learn how to assess acceptability, distinguish it from satisfaction and adherence, and use the findings to make defensible decisions before a definitive study.
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Designing a Study You Can Defend
A study may be methodologically sound yet impractical because of staffing, infrastructure, time, or financial requirements. Learn when cost and resource use should be feasibility outcomes, how to measure them, and how to distinguish resource feasibility from a formal economic evaluation.
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Designing a Study You Can Defend
Progression criteria help researchers determine whether preliminary feasibility findings justify proceeding to a definitive study, modifying the design, or undertaking further work. Learn how to select meaningful indicators, justify thresholds, account for uncertainty, and avoid treating progression decisions as mechanical pass-or-fail judgments.
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Designing a Study You Can Defend
Green-amber-red progression criteria can distinguish feasibility findings that support progression, require modification, or indicate substantial problems. Learn how traffic-light systems differ from pass-fail decisions, when they are useful, and why color categories should never replace methodological judgment.
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Designing a Study You Can Defend
A feasibility study can provide valuable evidence that a proposed definitive study should not proceed in its current form. Learn how to distinguish remediable implementation problems from fundamental barriers, evaluate progression criteria, and make a defensible decision without confusing feasibility failure with research failure.
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Designing a Study You Can Defend
Redesigning a study after unfavorable feasibility findings does not automatically mean repeating the entire preliminary investigation. Learn how to determine whether existing evidence remains applicable, which changes require targeted testing, and when a new feasibility study is justified before proceeding.
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Designing a Study You Can Defend
Preregistration creates a time-stamped record of important research decisions before the relevant results are known. Its main value is making it easier to distinguish advance plans from decisions influenced by the data.
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Designing a Study You Can Defend
A useful preregistration specifies the decisions that matter for interpreting your eventual claims, not every minor detail of the study. Learn what usually deserves advance specification and how detailed the plan should be.
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Designing a Study You Can Defend
A protocol describes how you plan to conduct a study; preregistration creates a time-stamped record of research decisions before the relevant results are known. The same document can sometimes serve both purposes, but the concepts are not interchangeable.
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Designing a Study You Can Defend
Preregistration can be valuable beyond conventional experiments, but not every study benefits in the same way. Its usefulness depends on which decisions can meaningfully be specified in advance and what transparency the advance record adds.
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Designing a Study You Can Defend
Qualitative research can be preregistered without pretending that its design is fixed or hypothesis-driven. A useful qualitative preregistration documents the study's starting point while preserving legitimate methodological adaptation.
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Designing a Study You Can Defend
Exploratory research can be preregistered without turning it into confirmatory research. The key is to preregister the starting point, scope, procedures, and decision rules you genuinely know in advance while leaving discoveries open.
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Designing a Study You Can Defend
You do not have to classify an entire study as either exploratory or confirmatory before collecting data. What matters is whether particular claims and analyses were specified before researchers learned from the evidence used to evaluate them.
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Designing a Study You Can Defend
A useful deviation report tells readers what was preregistered, what actually happened, why the change occurred, and when the decision was made. The goal is to make differences easy to find and interpret rather than forcing readers to reconstruct them.
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Designing a Study You Can Defend
Preregistering a primary outcome helps establish which result will provide the principal evidence for a study's research question. Learn how precisely to define that outcome, how to handle multiple outcomes, and what to do when changes become necessary.
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Designing a Study You Can Defend
Preregistering inclusion and exclusion criteria helps establish who is eligible for a study and which observations will contribute to its analyses. Learn how to write operational criteria, distinguish eligibility from data-quality exclusions, and manage necessary amendments without introducing avoidable bias.
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Designing a Study You Can Defend
Preregistering sample size and stopping rules clarifies how much data you intend to collect and when collection will end. Learn how to justify recruitment targets, avoid outcome-dependent stopping, accommodate sequential designs, and document unavoidable changes.
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Designing a Study You Can Defend
Subgroup analyses can reveal whether a research finding differs across populations, but they also create opportunities for misleading comparisons. Learn which subgroup analyses to preregister, how to specify them, and how to distinguish credible evidence of effect modification from exploratory findings.
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Designing a Study You Can Defend
Preregistration records important research decisions before the results are known, while Registered Reports add peer review before the study is completed. Neither requires researchers to predict everything perfectly or abandon legitimate changes and exploration.
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Designing a Study You Can Defend
Preregistration records a study plan before the relevant results are known. A Registered Report adds prospective journal peer review and in-principle acceptance, making publication less dependent on how the results turn out.
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Designing a Study You Can Defend
Registered Reports offer peer review of research questions and methods before the main results are known, but the format is not suitable for every project. Learn when to consider submitting one, what preparation is required, and how to determine whether the benefits justify the commitments.
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Designing a Study You Can Defend
Stage 1 peer review evaluates whether a proposed study addresses a meaningful question using methods capable of producing informative evidence. Learn what reviewers examine, which weaknesses commonly require revision, and how to prepare a stronger Registered Report submission.
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Designing a Study You Can Defend
Registered Reports are not inherently limited to quantitative experiments. Qualitative and mixed-methods researchers can use the format when journals support their methodologies and prospective review can evaluate meaningful research commitments without eliminating justified flexibility.
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Designing a Study You Can Defend
Research data quality begins with decisions made before the first observation is recorded. Learn how to identify critical variables, prevent measurement and recording errors, establish proportionate quality controls, and create a practical assurance plan for reliable and interpretable research evidence.
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Designing a Study You Can Defend
Not every research variable requires equally intensive verification. Learn how to identify critical variables, assess the consequences of measurement errors, and allocate data quality controls according to scientific importance, error risk, and research feasibility.
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