Gemma Sarigu, Department of Psychology

Email: gs1399@york.ac.uk

This case study details research relating to catastrophising symptoms and ability to cope with stressful life experiences, with open research practices embedded throughout the project. The work was done during an undergraduate summer internship, and time was allocated within this internship to develop and implement open research practices such as study pre-registration, open data, open and reproducible code, and use of open-source software (R). The researcher reflects on challenges with learning R when the only previous experience they had was using SPSS for statistical analyses, but mention the benefits their open data and code will have for future research and meta-analyses in the area.

The researcher ran a project that embedded open science (OS) practices as part of a six-week student research internship in July 2023. The researcher aimed to assess the relationship between catastrophising symptoms and individuals’ ability to cope with stressful life experiences. Current literature has found a relationship between catastrophising symptoms and coping ability for high-risk populations. Expanding on this, the researcher recruited from a general population sample who answered a recently developed questionnaire specific to non-pain catastrophising. The researcher also measured participants’ perceived socioeconomic status (SES), which they correlated with the above measures based on literature that poorer mental health is associated with lower SES.

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_{Gemma presenting their research poster at a conference}

This research study was conducted with OS principles in mind from the start, including pre-registration, open data, and open code. Before data collection, the study was pre-registered on the Open Science Framework (OSF) website. This ensured full transparency in the research process: the researcher pre-specified the research aims, hypothesis, procedure, and analysis plan. After data collection, the researcher analysed the data using R (open-source analysis software). They wrote their results as a fully computationally reproducible paper within an R notebook, accessible on OSF.

This research project fulfils the open practice of accessibility by having the anonymised data and code for the analysis fully available online on OSF. The R notebook allows transparency of completed analyses, which can be cross-referenced with the plans on the pre-registration form. This work also allows for reproducibility: the R notebook and data can be used to reproduce the results reported from this study exactly, and the open code also allows for potential replication studies to exactly repeat the analysis pipeline. Additionally, sharing their anonymised participant data allows for the reusability of the data in other studies, allowing for new analyses to be performed on the data or for the data to be combined with other datasets in systematic reviews/meta-analyses. This benefits other researchers, as data and analysis are available prior to publication, exceeding general standards of data sharing in the area. Thus, benefitting the overall literature by streamlining the process of conducting meta and systematic analysis. Lastly, this project could act as a template to include OS practices in future research internship opportunities, regardless of the career stage.

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Gemma at the British Conference of Undergraduate Research 2024

One of the barriers to using open research practices this researcher faced was the lack of knowledge and teaching on open research in the early stages of the Psychology undergraduate degree. Students are taught data analysis using SPSS, which is not an open software. The researcher overcame this challenge by asking their supervisor for resources to learn how to analyse data using R, which they studied independently during the data collection.  Additionally, they discussed OS principles with their supervisor, and then took the initiative to learn more about them. Together, the researchers planned the stages of the internship and allocated time specifically dedicated to open research practices (e.g. for pre-registration and learning R). Overall, the researcher learnt the importance of implementing OS practices. In the future, they aim to increase the accessibility of research conclusions for the general public, as well as the academic community.

• OSF project site with data and code: https://osf.io/w7ea3/

• Blog post written by Gemma about their summer internship: https://cognition-mental-health.github.io/blog/2023/gemma-internship/

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