The Role of Transparency in Maintaining the Legitimacy and Credibility of Survey Research

Researchers in the social sciences face competing pressures to both make high-quality scientific contributions to knowledge and to do so as quickly as possible. In survey research, a lack of rigorous documentation and critical introspection about methodological assumptions and decisions may put the quality of the associated work at severe risk. This chapter focuses on research transparency as a method of increasing the credibility of survey research and emphasizes how critical transparency is to building and maintaining the public trust in social science research.