Quality Indicators of Secondary Data Analyses in Special Education Research: A Preregistration Guide

Abstract

Secondary data analyses occur when new analyses are proposed for existing data. Although they are prevalent in special education research, there is little guidance on how to prepare secondary data analyses studies. Preregistration of secondary data analyses studies provides a nice opportunity and structure for fellow researchers to share innovative questions and analytic approaches to existing data sets as well as increase transparency. In this manuscript, we (a) describe quality indicators of secondary data analyses consistent with open science practices and (b) provide applied examples of these indicators from a sampling of published studies based on two iterations of data from the National Longitudinal Transition Study (NLTS2 and NLTS2012) with the overall goals to provide guidance to authors and peer reviewers and promote collaboration among fellow researchers engaged in secondary analyses for a range of purposes.

Intersectional Research as a Methodology for Shaping Transition Research in Support of Equitable Postschool Outcomes

“…Intersectional and open science research methods both traverse quantitative and qualitative paradigms. See, for example, Lombardi et al (2023), for a discussion of the application of transparency, a key concept across both intersectional research and open science methods and strategies. Although our focus in this paper was on our application of intersectional research in qualitative work, our larger project was a mixed-methods research design and intersectionality principles were challenging to apply in the quantitative work.…”

An Intersectional Examination of Economic Hardship and Individualized Education Program Meeting Participation

“…In this study, we used selected youth-and parent-reported items from the NLTS2012 that measure IEP meeting participation to conduct an in-depth examination and to better understand differences according to student characteristics based on not only disability but also race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. Throughout, we closely followed the quality indicators for preregistering secondary data analyses studies (Lombardi et al, 2023) in order to illustrate the practical application of this approach and promote openness and transparency (Nosek et al, 2018). Our goal was to establish a holistic measure of the transitionplanning process that is facilitated by the IEP meeting based on diverse intersectional student characteristics.…”

“…Last, we determined the relationship between transition planning and economic hardship (Lombardi, Wu, et al, 2022;Murray et al, 2015) and whether the relationship differs by the same set of student characteristics. Throughout, we closely followed quality indicators of preregistered secondary data analyses studies (Lombardi et al, 2023) in order to illustrate the practical application of this approach and promote openness and transparency (Nosek et al, 2018). We preregistered this study on Open Science Framework (OSF), a third-party registry website.…”

Evidence-Based Assessment in Special Education Research: Advancing the Use of Evidence in Assessment Tools and Empirical Processes

“…Likewise, as mentioned, preregistration of research is an empirical tool researchers can use to facilitate the advancement of empirical approaches within the OTM and CONTEXT. By preregistering study hypotheses and study methods, particularly descriptions of measurement tools and hypotheses regarding how and when specific outcomes using these tools are expected to converge or diverge (e.g., Lombardi et al, 2023), researchers can significantly advance evidence-based assessment in the education sciences.…”