Assessing Open Science practices in physical activity behaviour change intervention evaluations

Abstract

ObjectivesConcerns on the lack of reproducibility and transparency in science have led to a range of research practice reforms, broadly referred to as ‘Open Science’. The extent that physical activity interventions are embedding Open Science practices is currently unknown. In this study, we randomly sampled 100 reports of recent physical activity behaviour change interventions to estimate the prevalence of Open Science practices.MethodsOne hundred reports of randomised controlled trial physical activity behaviour change interventions published between 2018-2021 were identified. Open Science practices were coded in identified reports, including: study pre-registration, protocol sharing, data-, materials- and analysis scripts-sharing, replication of a previous study, open access publication, funding sources and conflict of interest statements. Coding was performed by two independent researchers, with inter-rater reliability calculated using Krippendorff’s alpha.Results78% of the 100 reports provided details of study pre-registration and 41% provided evidence of a published protocol. 4% provided accessible open data, 8% provided open materials and 1% provided open analysis scripts. 73% of reports were published as open access and no studies were described as replication attempts. 93% of reports declared their sources of funding and 88% provided conflicts of interest statements. A Krippendorff’s alpha of 0.73 was obtained across all coding.ConclusionOpen data, materials, analysis and replication attempts are currently rare in physical activity behaviour change intervention reports, whereas funding source and conflict of interest declarations are common. Future physical activity research should increase the reproducibility of their methods and results by incorporating more Open Science practices.

Assessing Open Science practices in physical activity behaviour change intervention evaluations

“… 20 This study was pre-registered on the Open Science Framework. 25 All deviations from this protocol are explicitly acknowledged in online supplemental file 1 . Deviations included adding an additional item to specify whether a declared study pre-registration was registered ahead of data collection, or whether it was actually retrospectively registered after data collection had commenced, as well as adding ‘funded by a non-profit’ options within funding source and conflict of interest assessment items.…”

Establishing open science research priorities in health psychology: a research prioritisation Delphi exercise

“…Within 250 studies across psychology published between 2014-2017, open access publication was relatively common (65%), whereas sharing of open materials (14%), data (2%) and analysis scripts (1%), pre-registration (3%) and study protocols (0%) were low (Hardwicke et al, 2021). Within behaviour change interventions as a subsection of health psychology, recent smoking cessation (Norris, He, et al, 2021) and physical activity interventions (Norris, Sulevani, et al, 2021) have been shown to have relatively common preregistration and Open Access publication but less engagement across the remainder of Open Science behaviours. Pre-registration (11%) availability was low but open data (23%) more available than in other meta-studies in the area of social distancing measures (Noone et al, 2021).…”

Open Science Research Priorities in Health Psychology

“…Within behaviour change interventions as a subsection of health psychology, recent smoking cessation (Norris, He, et al, 2021) and physical activity interventions (Norris, Sulevani, et al, 2021) The second ranked research question priority was "How can we maximise the usefulness of Open Data and Open Code resources?" (RQ#5: Ranked Top RQ by 6/24 respondents in phase 3).…”