A proposal for judging the trustworthiness of research findings

Gorard, S.

A proposal for judging the trustworthiness of research findings

Gorard, S.

Authors

Professor Stephen Gorard s.a.c.gorard@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Contributors

Professor Beng See b.h.see@durham.ac.uk
Other

Abstract

This paper offers a procedure for, and a description of the elements involved in judging how trustworthy a research finding is. The idea could be of value to the users of research evidence and to researchers themselves when setting out to create trustworthy evidence. The focus here is on active designs to address causal research questions, but the ideas can easily be extended to other types of research. Other than design, the elements suggested are sample size and quality, data quality, fidelity of intervention, and threats to validity. These are combined in a kind of 'sieve' to produce a judgement-based star-rating for the believability of a piece of research. Trustworthiness of research findings is currently an area with too little focus for the development of new researchers.

Citation

Gorard, S. (2015). A proposal for judging the trustworthiness of research findings

Journal Article Type	Article
Publication Date	Jan 1, 2015
Deposit Date	Jan 28, 2015
Publicly Available Date	Aug 24, 2015
Journal	researchED magazine
Peer Reviewed	Not Peer Reviewed
Publisher URL	http://www.workingoutwhatworks.com/en-GB/Magazine/2015/1/Trustworthiness_of_research