Replication standards for quantitative social science: Why not sociology?

Jeremy Freese*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

134 Scopus citations

Abstract

The credibility of quantitative social science benefits from policies that increase confidence that results reported by one researcher can be verified by others. Concerns about replicability have increased as the scale and sophistication of analyses increase the possible dependence of results on subtle analytic decisions and decrease the extent to which published articles contain full descriptions of methods. The author argues that sociology should adopt standards regarding replication that minimize its conceptualization as an ethical and individualistic matter and advocates for a policy in which authors use independent online archives to deposit the maximum possible information for replicating published results at the time of publication and are explicit about the conditions of availability for any necessary materials that are not provided. The author responds to several objections that might be raised to increasing the transparency of quantitative sociology in this way and offers a candidate replication policy for sociology.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)153-172
Number of pages20
JournalSociological Methods and Research
Volume36
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 2007

Keywords

  • Data archiving
  • Data sharing
  • Replication
  • Transparency

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Social Sciences (miscellaneous)
  • Sociology and Political Science

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