Protocol Templates: Building Your OSF Project

We have created protocol structure templates to support and guide the design of research methods for projects to be included in the URE Methods Repository on OSF. They provide structure by which particular methods are typically described.

Researchers can use as much or as little of a template as they wish to describe their own work; depending on the research project, some features of a particular template may be more or less relevant. This is also optimized for use with our importer.

The most common methods used in URE research each have a method-specific abstract template. In the Interview Abstract Template shown here, you can see prompted fields that are common across all template structures (e.g. Specific Application, URE Questions Addressed, Author Contact), as well as template fields that are more particular to interviews, such as Interview Goals and Design and Interview Form.

For researchers wishing to describe their method(s) in more detail within the Repository itself, we have developed elaborated templates each corresponding to one of our abstract templates. The elaborated templates contain components that create separate spaces for researchers to fully describe key aspects of their method(s) in an organized fashion.

Start Building Your Protocol

Click on any of the research methods below to access the Google document for that template.

From there, click File, and either select Make a Copy or Download As (and then select Microsoft Word (.docx).

All
Case Studies
Surveys
Interviews
Document/Research Analyses
Experiments
Observations

Interview

Interviews are often used to find out what people say about how, why and when they use research evidence as well as what and who influences their use of research evidence.

Survey Instrument

Surveys ask individuals to respond to structured prompts and report on various aspects of URE. Often, survey instruments, as a whole, or in part, are adopted and/or adapted by other research studies.

Survey Validation/Use

Researchers evaluate the technical qualities of surveys including their measurement characteristics and how the survey results are related to other measures of URE.

Document Analysis

Researchers analyze policy, legislative and judicial documents, communications, as well as documents from intermediaries and others to understand how, why, when and what research is used in the development of policies and practices.

Experiment

Researchers conduct experiments to investigate the causal effects of specific interventions on the use of research evidence.

Research Synthesis

Researchers use different approaches to synthesize bodies of URE research in order to make generalized claims about URE in particular contexts.

Integrated Case Study

Researchers use case studies to develop an in-depth understanding of some aspect of URE. Integrated case studies are those in which researchers integrate relevant evidence using different data methods in order to build the case(s).

Component Case Study

Researchers use case studies to develop an in-depth understanding of some aspect of URE. Component case studies are those in which researchers develop their case by first analyzing data using different data methods and then integrate the findings from each method to build the case (s).

Observation

Researchers use observation methods to interpret actions and interactions of participants within some social or cultural context in order to gain insight into some aspect of URE.

The Use of Research Evidence