In what follows, we discuss our experiences in building institutionalized procedures so as to facilitate access and channel collective energy. The central aim of these efforts is to enhance the quality of graduate advising. This is particularly important given the number of graduate students involved in experimental research may exceed the number of faculty (at least in our case) and institutions can ensure graduate students have access to feedback and data. A few caveats are in order. First, ours is but one experimental research group at a PhD granting institution (Northwestern University), and most involved take a quantitative approach to studying political behavior in the United States. Many of our procedures have benefits for other research areas and methods, but we recognize that we cannot generalize to all institutions and types of work. Our focus is primarily on survey and laboratory experiments. Second, we discuss three institutions—“a planning document,” research group,” and data “a “centralizing collection;” we do not claim each is unique to us, but we are unaware of another experimental research group that institutes each in the way that we do. Finally, we do not claim that our approach necessarily leads to higher quality research however, considering it has resulted per se; in nearly all graduate students involved finishing their degrees, obtaining jobs, and publishing work, we are confident that it works to some degree. More importantly, students have uniformly embraced the institutions. That said, downsides and alternatives clearly exist, and we touch on these (e.g., costs of our approach) in the conclusion. We also briefly discuss how our approach fits into two disciplinary-wide initiatives: pre-registration and the data access and research transparency (DA-RT) initiative. We write this paper to provide an example of one approach to graduate advising in for research groups using experimental methods. Planning Document
In what follows, we discuss our experiences in building institutionalized procedures so as to facilitate access and channel collective energy. The central aim of these efforts is to enhance the quality of graduate advising. This is particularly important given the number of graduate students involved in experimental research may exceed the number of faculty (at least in our case) and institutions can ensure graduate students have access to feedback and data. A few caveats are in order. First, ours is but one experimental research group at a PhD granting institution (Northwestern University), and most involved take a quantitative approach to studying political behavior in the United States. Many of our procedures have benefits for other research areas and methods, but we recognize that we cannot generalize to all institutions and types of work. Our focus is primarily on survey and laboratory experiments. Second, we discuss three institutions—“a planning document,” “a research group,” and “centralizing data collection;” we do not claim each is unique to us, but we are unaware of another experimental research group that institutes each in the way that we do. Finally, we do not claim that our approach necessarily leads to higher quality research per se; however, considering it has resulted in nearly all graduate students involved finishing their degrees, obtaining jobs, and publishing work, we are confident that it works to some degree. More importantly, students have uniformly embraced the institutions. That said, downsides and alternatives clearly exist, and we touch on these (e.g., costs of our approach) in the conclusion. We also briefly discuss how our approach fits into two disciplinary-wide initiatives: pre-registration and the data access and research transparency (DA-RT) initiative. We write this paper to provide an example of one approach to graduate advising in for research groups using experimental methods. Planning Document