Project Details
From “Academic works” to “Working in academia”: Analyzing reform proposals in an agent-based modelling approach
Applicant
Professor Dr. Felix Schönbrodt
Subject Area
General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
Personality Psychology, Clinical and Medical Psychology, Methodology
Term
since 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 464411255
This proposal is a continuation of the META-REP project, “How an academic system can achieve a trustworthy knowledge base: Analyzing reform proposals in an agent-based modeling approach.” It aims to expand our existing study of academia with agent-based models (ABMs) by focusing on the people doing the research, their demographics, life history, and strategic choices in an academic environment that contains hiring institutions, funders, and research assessment procedures. ABMs, which create virtual, simplified representations of real-world environments for computational simulation, are valuable tools in studying these processes. In the first funding phase of this project, ABMs addressed various meta-scientific questions, focusing on individual activities related to the production of academic works, such as replication studies, record checking and correction, and p-hacking. The second funding phase will expand on this work by targeting structural and institutional aspects of academia and related reform proposals, expanding the focus from “academic works” towards “working in academia”. The project will implement the demographics of virtual researchers and include population and labour dynamics in the ABMs. By that, the project will concentrate on researchers as human beings and analyse how structural reforms affect their life trajectories and productivity. The second funding phase consists of three major areas of study: 1. Research evaluation: Examining how changes in incentives and assessment practices impact researchers’ life trajectories and, subsequently, the quality of the literature. 2. Differential value of early and late interventions: Assessing the effectiveness of interventions aimed at increasing researchers’ capabilities and, consequently, the quality of their output, compared to post-hoc error control. 3. Institutional career conditions and constraints: Analysing the impact of contractual and legal constraints on researchers and their output. The project will use several ABMs, which are calibrated to reality by a multitude of empirical data, and conduct one empirical evaluation study of an innovative training programme (the “switch-to-open” programme for academic working groups) to generate actionable input to policy recommendations. The insights from this project will contribute to ongoing debates about academia. By understanding current practices and consequences of reform proposals through ABMs, we can shed light on META-REP’s “How” question – “how can replication rates be improved” – and ultimately contribute to enhancing the quality of research and the working conditions of researchers.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes