Ethics of analysis and publication in international development

Researchers have obligations to produce and disseminate high quality, rigorous, robust, and respectful materials. We explore how replication - revisits, restudies and reanalysis - can increase the robustness of quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods in development research. While acknowledging that quality is seldom the main reason why findings inform policymaking, we argue that replication has clear implications for development policymaking. We demonstrate this through discussion of social science practices that are currently more common in fields outside development studies, providing examples from our own and others’ development research. We conclude that practices such as deposit of research materials, raw data and computer code have much to offer development, but also have the potential to become another tool for audit and surveillance