Annette N. Brown
FHI 360, Durham, USA
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Is replication research the study of research or of researchers?
A few years ago, I and my colleagues designed the push button replication project with the dual objectives of discovering whether development impact evaluations are push button replicable and of implementing the project as transparently as possible. We were disappointed upon journal acceptance to be told that we could not make public our findings for individual studies in our sample because we had not received IRB approval. In this presentation, I will report the results of the push button replication project. I will also discuss a set of ethics considerations I have encountered in funding and conducting replication research. These considerations often underly the replication debates, for example the definitions of successful and failed replications, and hinge on the question of whether replication is the study of research or researchers.