Opportunities, Challenges, and Tensions: Open Science through a lens of Qualitative Social Psychology.

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a focus in social psychology on efforts to improve the robustness, rigour, transparency, and openness of psychological research. This has led to a plethora of new tools, practices, and initiatives that each aim to combat questionable research practices and improve the credibility of social psychological scholarship. However, the majority of these efforts derive from quantitative, deductive, hypothesis-testing methodologies, and there has been a notable lack of in-depth exploration about what the tools, practices, and values may mean for research which uses qualitative methodologies. Here, we introduce a Special Section of BJSP: Open Science, Qualitative Methods and Social Psychology: Possibilities and Tensions. Authors critically discuss a range of issues, including authorship, data sharing, and broader research practices. Taken together, these papers urge the discipline to carefully consider the ontological, epistemological and methodological underpinnings of efforts to improve psychological science, and advocate for a critical appreciation of how mainstream open science discourse may (or may not) be compatible with the goals of qualitative research.