The purpose of this project is to promote open science (e.g., transparency, openness, and reproducibility) within the psychology of religion/spirituality (PoR/S) field. The PoR/S field has been criticized for numerous reasons, including questionable research practices (e.g., p-hacking), perceived R/S biases, isolation from mainstream scholarship, unrepresentative samples, underpowered studies, nonreplicated findings, simplistic designs, and problematic analyses.
Open science practices (OSPs; e.g., sharing data/materials, preregistering hypotheses and analytic plans) and registered reports (RRs) address these issues. By encouraging OSPs and increasing exposure to RRs across key journals, we can lead by example and elevate field norms. Doing so will help answer Big Questions for the PoR/S field: Why are OSPs not yet widely used? Why are there so few RRs? Can incentives and modeling stimulate the use of OSPs and RRs in flagship PoR/S journals?
This project will incentivize PoR/S researchers to conduct RRs (using OSPs) and expert reviewers to evaluate them. Awardees will use OSPs and publish their RRs in 1 of 3 flagship PoR/S journals: Psychology of Religion and Spirituality (PRS), Archive for the Psychology of Religion (APR), or International Journal for the Psychology of Religion (IJPR). The Outputs of this work will be 18 RRs and datasets; 9 presentations; 1 website; 3 scholarly articles; and 5 editorials, blogs, or magazine articles. We expect the increase in RRs and OSPs in the field will expand beyond these 3 journals, inspiring other PoR/S journals and scholars to publish RRs and use OSPs.
