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

Abstract

This paper offers a procedure for, and a description of the elements involved in judging how trustworthy a research finding is. The idea is of value to the users of research evidence and to researchers themselves when creating a synthesis of existing evidence (i.e. in a literature review. 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. (2014). A proposal for judging the trustworthiness of research findings. Radical statistics, 110, 47-59

Journal Article Type	Article
Publication Date	Jan 1, 2014
Deposit Date	May 28, 2014
Publicly Available Date	Nov 13, 2014
Journal	Radical statistics.
Print ISSN	0268-6376
Publisher	Radical Statistics Group
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	110
Pages	47-59
Publisher URL	http://www.radstats.org.uk/journal/journalissue110/