Running head: OPEN DESCRIPTIVE DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE

Open Science Considerations for Descriptive Research in Developmental Science

Jessica E. Kosie & Casey Lew-Williams

Department of Psychology, Princeton University

(manuscript in press, Infant and Child Development)

Keywords: open science, transparency, descriptive research, infant development, child

development

Contact Information: Jessica E. Kosie - jkosie@princeton.edu; Casey Lew-Williams -

caseylw@princeton.edu

Data Availability Statement: Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were
created or analyzed.

Conflicts of Interest: None.

Funding: This work was supported by an F32 Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to J.E. Kosie (F32HD103439) and by
a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to C. Lew-Williams
(R01HD095912).
OPEN DESCRIPTIVE DEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE

Abstract

Descriptive developmental research seeks to document, describe, and analyze the conditions
under which infants and children live and learn. Here, we articulate how open-science practices
can be incorporated into descriptive research to increase its transparency, reliability, and
replicability. To date, most open-science practices have been oriented toward experimental
rather than descriptive studies, and it can be confusing to figure out how to translate open-
science practices (e.g., preregistration) for research that is more descriptive in nature. We
discuss a number of unique considerations for descriptive developmental research, taking
inspiration from existing open-science practices and providing examples from recent and
ongoing studies. By embracing a scientific culture where descriptive research and open science
coexist productively, developmental science will be better positioned to generate
comprehensive theories of development and understand variability in development across
communities and cultures.

Highlights

Descriptive research is vital to the development of comprehensive theories of early

development, and open-science practices can increase the transparency and replicability of this
effort.

Many existing open-science practices are oriented toward experimental rather than descriptive
research.

Considerations related to the adoption of open-science practices in descriptive research are

discussed, complemented by examples of successful adoption.

Keywords

open science, transparency, descriptive research, infant development, child development

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Descriptive studies of infants’ and children’s behavior and input are vital for theories of early
learning and development. Though developmental science has been dominated by
experimental designs for many years, descriptive research – which documents, describes, and
analyzes the conditions under which infants live and learn in a variety of natural settings – has
had a continuous and vibrant presence, and has played a primary role in shaping our
understanding of early development. Descriptive research provides important detail about the
natural contexts in which infants learn and, beyond its strong independent value, guides the
design of more ecologically-valid experimental studies. In these ways, descriptive research
generates new insights that would be missed by focusing on experiments alone.

Across all fields of psychology and related disciplines, there has been a shift in the past decade
toward the wide adoption of practices that increase the openness, transparency, and
replicability of research (Nelson et al., 2018; Spellman et al., 2018). Many of the developmental
scientists who are incorporating descriptive studies into their own research program have also
readily adopted open-science practices (e.g., sharing audio and video recordings alongside
detailed coding guidelines and, in some cases, even coding software or scripts), and their work
highlights the many benefits that open science offers for descriptive research. At the same time,
however, incorporating open science practices into descriptive research can raise unique
challenges. Thus, adoption of practices that increase the transparency of descriptive work also
requires researchers to carefully balance the costs and benefits of incorporating open-science
practices.

Throughout this paper, we discuss how descriptive research and open science can coexist
productively, inspired by existing open-science practices, but geared toward helping those who
intend to do open, descriptive research in the field of infant and child development. In an effort
to understand and describe varied dynamics of infants’ everyday learning environment, we have
increased the use of descriptive methods in our own research over recent years (e.g., Casey et
al., in prep; Kosie & Lew-Williams, in prep). Transparency and replicability is of primary concern,
and we have drawn inspiration from the practices of other researchers who are doing related
descriptive work in a way that is open and transparent (e.g., Bergelson, Amatuni, et al., 2019;
Bergelson, Casillas, et al., 2019; Bunce et al., 2020; Casillas et al., 2020; Cychosz et al., 2021;
Herzberg et al., 2021; Hoch et al., 2019, 2020; Karasik et al., 2018; Kremin et al., 2020;
Mendoza & Fausey, 2021a, 2021b; Romeo et al., 2018; Soderstrom et al., 2021; Sullivan et al.,
2020; Warlaumont et al., 2014).

Our goal is to share this accumulated knowledge with others, highlighting examples and making
suggestions for how open-science practices can be incorporated into descriptive research. First,
we clarify what we mean by “descriptive research” for the purposes of this article. We then
discuss unique challenges to descriptive, as compared to experimental, research. Next, we
outline a set of considerations related to these challenges, focusing on suggestions for
increasing transparency and reproducibility. Throughout the paper, we pose a number of open
questions and concerns that we hope will spark discussion about how to best continue
promoting and increasing transparency in descriptive developmental science.

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What do we mean by “descriptive research”?

The category of “descriptive research” is wide-ranging. It can include qualitative, quantitative,

and mixed-methods studies across a variety of behavioral disciplines that include psychology,
linguistics, education, sociology, and anthropology (to name just a few). Descriptive research in
the behavioral sciences often involves observing events - either via live observation or
audio/video recordings - and annotating different aspects of situations as they naturally unfold.
These descriptions of events are then organized in a way that enables a reader to understand
various features of the observed activity (e.g., the occurrence and timing of behaviors), and
frequently include data visualization or summary statistics across individuals or groups to clearly
communicate effects that may be present.

Early work in the field of developmental psychology was largely descriptive in nature, often
involving individuals’ detailed observations of infants’ and children’s physical, motor, and
language development (e.g., Darwin, 1877; Gesell, 1928, 1940; McGraw, 1935; Preyer, 1888;
Shinn, 1900; Tiedemann, 1787). In the mid-1900s, the rise of behaviorism and the development
of new methods to index infants’ cognitive processing - for example methods based on infant
looking (see Aslin, 2007 for a review) - led to an increase in experimental studies of early
development. Experimental research quickly became the dominant mode of investigation.
Despite this prioritization of experimental work, descriptive research has continued to be a
central method for investigating early development , and has fostered greater understanding of
the natural conditions in which infants and children live and learn. The independent value of
descriptive work has been evidenced by both early and more contemporary research. For
example, in the 1920s and 1930s, Arnold Gesell developed new methods for observing and
documenting early development, which resulted in a catalog of infant and child behavior and the
construction of a set of developmental norms that - for better or worse (see Thelen & Adolph,
1992 for further discussion) - are still used today (e.g., Gesell, 1928; Gesell & Ilg, 1943; Gesell
& Thompson, 1934). A second example comes from more contemporary work on infants’
natural walking behavior. This research provides insights into the development of infants’
walking ability and how the shift from crawling to walking shapes infants’ input from the world
and from other people (e.g., Adolph et al., 2012; Adolph & Tamis-LeMonda, 2014; Karasik et al.,
2011; Karasik et al., 2014). This more comprehensive understanding of motor skill development
– grounded in descriptive methods – has generated clinical implications that extend beyond
motor development (e.g., Adolph et al., 2018). Additionally, recent descriptive work has revealed
marked differences between the way that learning is typically tested in the lab and how it occurs
in infants’ everyday lives (Casey et. al, in prep; Clerkin et al., 2017; Fausey et al., 2016; Kosie &
Lew-Williams, in prep). Descriptive studies of infants’ everyday environments provide insight
into the mechanisms that underlie early learning, help generate informed hypotheses, enable
testing of hypotheses in ways that are ecologically valid, allow for comparison of in-lab and at-
home infant behaviors, and contribute to comprehensive theories of infant development. As the
field moves toward conducting more cross-cultural, cross-community research, there may be
practical and intellectual advantages to prioritizing descriptive research.

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For the purposes of the current paper, we restrict our definition of “descriptive research” to the
type of studies we most commonly design and encounter in our area of developmental
psychology - early cognitive development - and to research that is more quantitative in nature
(e.g., involving numerical summaries and statistical analyses). However, qualitative researchers
have thought carefully about open science considerations (e.g., Braun & Clarke, 2021; Haven et
al., 2020; Humphreys et al., 2021), and there is much to learn from their work, though we do not
directly address qualitative research in the current paper. Further, while much neuroscientific
research in this area is often descriptive as well (e.g., physiological mapping studies), our focus
is on behavioral studies.

Descriptive studies in early cognitive development frequently seek to characterize observed

behaviors of infants, children, and caregivers, either individually or during naturalistic
interactions. Examples of this type of descriptive research include investigations of the
dynamics of caregiver-infant interactions (e.g., Custode & Tamis-LeMonda, 2020; Kosie & Lew-
Williams, in prep; Romeo et al., 2018; Rowe et al., 2008; Tincoff et al., 2019), speech available
in infants’ and children’s everyday environment (e.g., Bergelson, Amatuni, et al., 2019;
Bergelson, Casillas, et al., 2019; Casey et al., in prep; Casillas et al., 2020; Kremin et al., 2020;
Roy et al., 2015; Weisleder & Fernald, 2013), infants’ everyday musical experience (Mendoza &
Fausey, 2021a), the prevalence of varied categories of visual information in infants’ everyday
visual input (Clerkin et. al, 2017; Fausey et al., 2016), and more. While some studies are purely
descriptive, with the focused goal of describing behavior, many other studies involve first
describing a behavior and then linking these observations to each other or to other measures
(e.g., Romeo et al., 2018; Rowe et al., 2008; Weisleder & Fernald, 2013).

Descriptive work poses unique challenges for openness and transparency

Researchers studying infant and child development have been responsive to the field’s unique
challenges for addressing issues related to open science (see Davis-Kean & Ellis, 2019; Eason
et al., 2017; Gennetian et al., 2022; and Peterson, 2016 for further discussion of these issues)
and have led the field toward increasing transparency and replicability in a variety of ways.
These responses include developmental-specific considerations about preregistration (Havron
et al., 2020), improving measurement (Byers-Heinlein et al., 2021; DeBolt et al., 2020), thinking
carefully about sample size issues (Oakes, 2017; Schott et al., 2019), sharing video, audio, and
other data (Cychosz et al., 2020; Gilmore et al., 2020, 2021), meta-analysis (Bergmann et al.,
2018), and collaborative research (Frank et al., 2017; Byers-Heinlein et al., 2020). While these
varied responses to replicability issues apply more or less well to a broad range of
developmental research, they have primarily been oriented toward experimental rather than
descriptive studies. Existing open-science principles translate less directly to work that is more
descriptive in nature, though this domain of research is an essential part of developmental
science - and in the future, we hope it takes on a central role.

In infancy research, experimental studies frequently involve exposing infants to a carefully

constructed task and measuring their behavior. For example, researchers are commonly
interested in the location and duration of infant looks, patterns of neural activity, or overt motor

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behaviors (e.g., pointing, reaching for objects, exchanging objects with another person).
Experiments are almost always designed with the goal of eliciting a particular behavior and
drawing inferences based on the sample of that behavior (e.g., using infant looking as an index
of attention or even “preference”). Researchers almost always have a hypothesis about what
patterns of behavior to expect under different conditions and can frequently generate some idea
of the size of the effect. These features of experimental work lend themselves well to open-
science practices like preregistration, and the numerical data that result from many experimental
studies can easily be de-identified for sharing. While this doesn’t necessarily make it “easy” to
do open, replicable science, it does make it more straightforward to implement existing open-
science practices into each phase of a project.

Descriptive research, on the other hand, differs from experiments across key dimensions.
Existing “best practices” for open science do not translate clearly to descriptive studies, and
descriptive research may be more vulnerable to issues related to transparency and
reproducibility. For example, instead of having strong expectations about a restricted set of
behaviors, researchers doing descriptive work may first want to observe all that is occurring
during natural interactions, and only then classify the behaviors of infants and caregivers (e.g.,
different categories of gestures or words). In such cases, researchers may not start out with
clear, pre-existing expectations about the behaviors that will occur across individuals and
contexts (e.g., Prather, 2021).

Contemporary researchers doing descriptive work have served as an example of how to

address these issues. Inspired by their practices, we now turn to describing key considerations
for conducting open descriptive research. In turn, we discuss preregistration, sample size
justification, open procedures for coding, and sharing audio/video data.

Preregistering descriptive research

Preregistration involves specifying - often in advance of data collection - hypotheses and

predictions, information about procedures and materials, variables, sampling plans, exclusion
criteria, and analysis plans with the goal of decreasing the occurrence of false-positives and
“researcher degrees of freedom” across all phases of experimental design and implementation
(Simmons et al., 2011, 2021). In many ways, the objectives of preregistration seem to contradict
the goals of descriptive research, which is often considered to primarily be exploratory (e.g,.
looking for stable patterns in the absence of a priori predictions; Scheel et al., 2021). In practice,
though, much descriptive work in our field often also involves pre-planned analyses, such as
linking features of infant-directed input to behavioral and neurological measures of language
development (e.g., Kosie & Lew-Williams, in prep; Romeo et al., 2018; Weisleder & Fernald,
2013) or comparing the frequency of different classifications of behavior (e.g., between- versus
within-sentence language switching in bilingual infants’ everyday language input; Kremin et al.,
2020). This raises an interesting tension between predetermined/confirmatory versus
exploratory goals in descriptive research.

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Still, because descriptive work tends to be considered exploratory rather than confirmatory, the
value of preregistration is often questioned. Further, even if a goal can be specified in advance
(e.g., comparing multimodal input to language learning), this analysis cannot be considered
completely confirmatory if there isn’t a clear, predefined decision about which features of
multimodal input will be annotated and how. This calls into question whether there is any value
in preregistering a descriptive study at all. In reality, however, most work - descriptive included -
falls on a continuum between confirmatory and exploratory (Scheel et al., 2021). It is the case
that various dimensions of preregistration, like conducting a power analysis to determine sample
size or outlining comprehensive analysis plans in advance, can be challenging for descriptive
work. However, many dimensions of preregistration may still be valuable.

For example, even in descriptive work, researchers often have hypotheses and predictions
about what they expect to find (see Kremin et al., 2020 or Romeo et al., 2018 for examples of
preregistered studies that fall under our definition of descriptive research). A preregistration for
descriptive work may include information about the behaviors the researchers seek to describe
(e.g., if describing the occurrence of gestures, one can define what is meant by “gesture” and
what counts or does not count as a gesture), how reliability will be assessed, what comparisons
(if any) will be tested, and whether and how the video or audio corpus being described has been
used in previous studies (which clarifies what researchers knew about the data before
generating hypotheses). Additionally, researchers may opt to create simpler preregistrations
(e.g., using the AsPredicted template or website; https://aspredicted.org/) that include answers
to a few brief questions about study design and analyses (e.g., Kosie & Lew-Williams, in prep).
Another option is to finalize a coding scheme with a few pilot participants and then - prior to
coding the remaining data - preregister a study’s methods (e.g., Kremin et al., 2020). If a
researcher desires to preregister the initial coding as well, a sequential preregistration (Nosek et
al., 2018) in which components of a study can be preregistered incrementally, may be a useful
option.

A common, yet incorrect, belief about preregistration is that decisions are set in stone and
preclude changes or exploratory analyses (Nosek et al., 2019). This misconception can lead to
researchers avoiding preregistration out of fear that they will want to change an aspect of their
design or conduct additional analyses. It is often better to amend a preregistration with
justification for the amendment rather than to stick with, for example, a coding procedure or
analysis that is not ideal. After all, a primary goal of preregistration is transparency, rather than
imposing unnecessary constraints on research. Sharing this information enables readers of the
paper and the preregistration to make judgments about both their confidence in different pieces
of the work and also as a source of information about how the study was conducted and how to
replicate it.

While we suggest that there are reasons a preregistration may be worthwhile for a descriptive
study, and encourage adoption of this practice, we acknowledge that the two sometimes are not
a perfect fit. Researchers should make their own decisions about whether and what type of
preregistration makes sense for their particular research design. The presence or absence of a
preregistration is not the sole determinant of whether or not a study is “open”, and there are

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many other practices - a number of which are discussed below - that can be implemented by
descriptive researchers to increase the transparency and replicability of their work. However,
preregistration for a descriptive study can serve as a useful mechanism for outlining plans in
advance and allow readers to decide for themselves where to put a study on the spectrum
between exploratory and confirmatory (with neither end of the spectrum having objectively
greater value).

Justifying sample size

Determining sample size can be challenging, even in experimental research when there is a
strong expectation about the size and direction of an effect that a researcher expects to find. In
descriptive work, there may be even weaker expectations about the size of an effect and, in
some cases, the goal may be to simply describe variability in a behavior rather than look for a
particular effect at all. Thus, a power analysis may not be possible or, if many parameters are
unknown or require reliance on vague estimates, simply be uninformative. Further, even if
enough information exists to enable a power analysis, it may not be possible to collect the
sample size required, given that great effort is usually put into descriptions of even one
participant. It can be challenging to recruit infants in general, and these challenges are more
pronounced when the target of investigation is an understudied population or a small cultural
group. However, sample size issues cannot be completely ignored, and researchers should
think carefully about the value of the information the study will provide for a given sample size
(Lakens, 2021).

As with preregistration, the presence or absence of a power analysis is also not the sole
determiner of the openness or transparency of research. When a power analysis is not possible
for whatever reason, there are many other methods that can be used to justify sample size (e.g.,
Lakens, 2021). For example, time may be a factor that limits a researcher to a relatively small
sample. Manual transcription of audio or video files is a lengthy process (one estimate, for
example, is that careful transcription takes one hour per minute of speech; Gippert et al., 2006),
and the time it takes to generate a full transcription can vary widely depending on features like
the clarity of the audio or video files and the level of detail at which the files are being coded. It
may also be the case that it is simply not feasible to collect data from more than a small number
of individuals from an understudied population or culture (e.g., Casillas et al., 2020), or even
more than just one individual in extreme cases (e.g., Roy et al., 2015). These limiting factors
can be described as sample size justifications in a manuscript (and reported in advance in a
preregistration). Additionally, it can often be the case that having a small sample of data is
preferable to having no data at all, as small samples can generate meaningful insights about
behavioral phenomena – perhaps even more so in descriptive than in experimental studies.
Transparency in how sample size was determined, no matter how small or large, enables
readers to make an informed judgment about how to interpret descriptive research findings
(Lakens, 2021).

As in experimental work (e.g., ManyBabies Consortium, 2020), descriptive researchers have

embraced collaborative science to increase the sample size and cultural and linguistic diversity

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of research participants. For example, the Analyzing Child Language Experiences around the
World (ACLEW; Soderstrom et al., 2021) project is a collaboration between researchers who
build datasets, design computational tools, and have developed a standardized transcription
scheme for studying early language experience in a way that is cross-culturally valid. While the
ACLEW project primarily focuses on language and auditory input, the goal of the Play and
Learning Across a Year (PLAY) project (Soska et al., 2021) is to build a dataset that includes
video of naturalistic activity between caregivers and infants. When complete, the PLAY dataset
will contain coded videos of mother-infant interactions, video tours of families’ homes, measures
of ambient noise, and data from a variety of parent-report questionnaires collected by scientists
at 50 universities in the United States and Canada. In addition to increasing sample size and
diversity, researchers also benefit from the carefully constructed and shared coding procedures
and tools for analyzing descriptive data that are generated by collaborative efforts like these.

Beyond large-scale collaborations like ACLEW and PLAY, the sharing of data and materials for
individual descriptive studies of any size (described in further detail below) can increase
cumulative sample size and diversity as well. For example, a single descriptive study may not
have sufficient data to draw robust conclusions, and the sample characteristics may not allow
generalization to other groups or cultures. However, if materials (e.g., videos, audio files, coding
manuals, etc) are shared, other researchers may be able to add to and build on this existing
research. Cumulative science efforts like this enable researchers to amass large and diverse
samples with which to investigate and explore variability surrounding a broad range of research
questions. Each individual sample, no matter the size, adds incremental value.

Open coding procedures and materials

Researchers doing descriptive work are interested in a large variety of behaviors, most of which
do not have a one-size-fits-all definition. For example, caregivers’ or infants’ gestures have been
of interest to many researchers (Gogate et al., 2000; Iverson et al., 1999; Kosie & Lew-Williams,
in prep; Rowe et al., 2008), but the precise definition of a gesture may vary across studies.
While some studies may count only pointing as a “gesture”, others may include “any intentional,
communicative movement of the body or limbs” (e.g., pointing and head nods and shrugging the
shoulders for “I don’t know” and extending and retracting the index finger to represent a worm;
Iverson et al., 1999; Kosie & Lew-Williams, in prep). There are merits to both of these
approaches, but what exactly counts as a gesture may differ across studies based on the
researchers’ goal, intuition, or previous experience. To further complicate things, there may be
variability across studies in basic considerations such as the timing at which a gesture is
considered to have begun or ended. A comprehensive description of coding procedures is
essential for reliability and replication, as well as basic understanding and interpretation of
research findings.

It quickly becomes apparent that clear and detailed coding instructions and guidelines matter. In
the above example, the estimate of the number of gestures could vary widely depending on
guidelines about when and how gestures are coded. A lack of clear coding guidelines can result
in low reliability across coders within a given study or incorrect conclusions about how well the

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results of one study reporting the frequency of caregiver and infant gestures aligns with the
results of another report of gesture frequency. As a consequence of this required degree of
attention, it often takes extensive training for coders to become reliable in coding such observed
behaviors. Within one lab, researchers often create detailed coding manuals that specify each
consideration that a coder must make when deciding whether and when a behavior occurs.
However, it is not uncommon for such descriptions to receive only brief mention in a methods
section. One contributing factor to this issue is that the level of detail that can be included in the
methods section of papers is restricted by the word limit, often leading to a lack of clarity about
exactly what counts as each type of coded behavior. This makes it challenging for readers to
understand precisely what was coded and to attempt to replicate the paper’s coding in their own
work. Additionally, as mentioned above, researchers can use and build on existing shared
coding procedures. In addition to avoiding the need to “reinvent the wheel” each time a
researcher wants to code a specific behavior, use of the same shared coding schema (e.g.,
Soderstrom et al., 2021) makes it easier to compare how a behavior varies (or not) across
studies or groups, and further increases the potential for later analyses that pool across
datasets.

For most publications, coding materials can be shared in supplementary material or posted
online (e.g., on the Open Science Framework or OSF; https://www.osf.io/) for use by other
researchers. Ideally, shared coding materials would include a detailed coding manual and
example clips depicting the different coded behaviors. We have found that it can be helpful for
training and clarity to have three types of clips: (1) examples that clearly depict the behavior of
interest, (2) examples that are clearly not the behavior of interest, and (3) edge cases that
challenge intercoder reliability, along with a description of why each case does or does not
count as the observed behavior. These existing examples can be shared in supplementary
material, after addressing participant confidentiality, to increase transparency of the description
of coding procedures.

Beyond basic information about how coded variables were defined, transparency in timing-
related information should also be included for studies that code video and/or audio data
(Mendoza & Fausey, 2021b). For example, some researchers code continuously (by identifying
the onset and offset of behaviors as a video unfolds; e.g., Kosie & Lew-Williams, in prep) while
others ask coders to make binary decisions about events or objects present in shorter clips. For
example, Fausey and colleagues (2016) asked coders to identify the presence of faces or
hands in images extracted at ⅕ Hz (i.e., once every 5 seconds) from continuous video, while
Cychosz and colleagues (2021) presented coders with 30 second audio clips which were coded
for various features of infants’ speech input. Still others use automated analyses to identify
regions of interest - such as moments with lots of speaking - and code only those regions (e.g.,
Weisleder & Fernald, 2013). To increase transparency and replicability, we and others (e.g.,
Mendoza & Fausey, 2021b) recommend including information about why a particular method
was chosen along with evidence to support the choice (e.g., Why would you expect to
accurately capture a behavior using 5s clips versus continuous coding? Why 5s and not 30s
clips?).

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Technical details about coding can increase transparency as well. For example, knowing the
software used to code video or audio files (e.g., Datavyu, Datavyu Team, 2014; ELAN,
Wittenberg et al., 2006) can help others understand the coding structure, as well as details
about opening and interpreting coded files. A number of researchers have shared even more
detailed resources that include, for example, annotation procedures, accompanying materials,
and software and scripts. Mendoza and Fausey (2021b) outline in detail their procedures for
annotating daylong audio recordings, including discussion of theoretical issues at stake as well
as supporting materials for implementation (e.g., training manuals, code for assessing reliability)
available on an associated OSF page. This work is an ideal example of shared information
about coding procedures and an immensely helpful resource for researchers who want to
annotate daylong audio recordings. The ACLEW team has also developed a variety of
resources that include training materials for transcription as well as tools for automated
annotation of daylong audio recordings (e.g., Le Franc et al., 2018; Räsänen et al., 2021;
Soderstrom et al., 2021). Cychosz and colleagues (2021) created a set of Python scripts for
efficiently sampling and annotating daylong audio recordings for various features of natural
linguistic input (e.g., addressee, language); these scripts are described in detail in the
manuscript and freely shared on GitHub (https://github.com/megseekosh/Categorize_app_v2).
In addition to these examples, a variety of guidelines, scripts, and packages have been created
and shared by researchers to facilitate the collection, coding, and analysis of naturalistic input
(e.g., Anderson et al., 2021; Casillas & Scaff, 2021; Gautheron et al., 2021; Manning et al.,
2020; Sanchez et al., 2019; Woon et al., 2021). All of these products serve as excellent
examples of how to increase the openness and transparency of descriptive work, but are also
important resources that researchers can implement themselves when coding naturalistic
behavior.

Full transparency about coding also includes clear information about coder training and
reliability, either in the manuscript itself or in supplementary materials (e.g., Mendoza & Fausey,
2021a). There is substantial variation in what type of reliability analysis is used and is
appropriate across descriptive studies. Information related to reliability includes: how many files
were coded by two or more coders, what counts as a “match” in coding, and what analyses
were used to assess reliability. When coding gestures, does a code only count as “matching” if
coders agree that the gesture starts and ends in the same second? For some types of
descriptive work, the level of agreement we’ve come to expect from experimental tasks (e.g.,
looking to the left or right) may be unrealistic. For example, researchers may choose to loosen
the criteria for a “match” between two coders (e.g., rather than requiring that a gesture be
identified on exactly the same frame, a gesture counts as a match as long as both coders
identify a gesture within a 2-second window). In addition to allowing readers to assess the
reliability of coded behaviors, providing readers with detail about how reliability was assessed is
a valuable source of information about how to approach reliability when using the existing
coding methods in their own work.

Finally, researchers’ own positionality – their world views, experiences, and the position they
adopt toward a research study – has a substantial influence on their work, including the
behaviors that they choose to code (Field & Derksen, 2021; Holmes, 2020; Malterud, 2001).

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Acknowledging this subjectivity can sometimes raise concerns or lead readers to devalue work
that is more descriptive in nature, due to an outsize focus on objectivity as a hallmark of high-
quality research (Field & Derksen, 2021; Gogh & Madill, 2012). However, while subjectivity may
be more obvious in descriptive studies, researchers’ backgrounds and beliefs significantly bias
experimental work as well (Gogh & Madill, 2012). Additionally, the process of reflexivity -
researchers’ awareness of how personal experiences influence their research - can be
extremely beneficial (Field & Derksen, 2021; Finlay, 2002a, 2002b). Acknowledging such
influences can help the researcher understand and perhaps reduce their effects, and can
sometimes lead to new insights that foster discovery. Making coding procedures and materials
open can allow others to better assess how the original researchers’ positionality may have
influenced the conclusions of a study and perhaps adapt the coding in light of some of these
effects. To make researchers’ own individual influence(s) more explicit, they may choose to
include positionality statements in their papers, as is common in much qualitative work (Holmes,
2020).

Sharing audio and video files

Sharing audio and video files is common in descriptive work (e.g., Databrary, 2012; Gilmore et
al., 2018; MacWhinney, 2000, 2014; MacWhinney & Snow, 1985: VanDam et al., 2016). In
addition to simply making the research more transparent, sharing audio and video data has a
number of benefits to the research community. For example, if one seeks to replicate the coding
procedures of a previous study, it can be helpful to see video examples of moments at which
the original researchers coded a particular behavior of interest. Additionally, sharing audio and
video files enables others to use these data to ask new questions or to extend existing research
to a new culture or community. In this way, open audio and video data - along with procedural
information such as instructions given to participants - can increase the accessibility of
research, particularly for research groups who cannot easily collect this type of data. Sharing
can also enable researchers to extend a method of coding that they created using their own
audio or video data (perhaps collected from a convenience sample located near their own lab)
to similar audio or video recordings of infants in different contexts or cultures, increasing the
generalizability of findings.

Decisions about what to share may depend on the type of permissions allowed by the lab’s
Institutional Review Board (IRB) or ethics committee or what each participant or community is
willing to make publicly shareable. Under ideal circumstances, researchers would share
(securely and with parental permission) unedited audio or video files along with coded data, as
a reader can see first-hand how each behavior was coded across a corpus. However, this is not
always feasible due to a variety of considerations (e.g., understudied populations, IRB
guidelines, etc), and participant consent and confidentiality is always the primary determinant of
what can be shared. Even when sharing full audio and video files is not possible, however, there
are still options for making data open in ways that are ethical and respectful of privacy concerns.
For example, researchers may prefer to share clips of recordings that depict important features
of the reported observations (e.g., examples of behaviors that were classified as gestures) from

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just a few participants who have provided consent to do so. Another option is to share only
transcriptions or files with only coded data rather than raw video or audio files.

There are many repositories available for sharing audio and video recordings of infants’ and
children’s everyday experience - as well as associated data, metadata, and/or analysis tools. A
few popular options include the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES),
Homebank, and Databrary. CHILDES was established in 1984 and was the first major effort to
archive and share transcripts of child language; in fact, it is a remarkably early example of an
open-science effort. Since its creation, CHILDES has grown to include tens of thousands of
publicly available transcripts of children’s early language input and use in a number of
languages and across typical and atypical development (https://childes.talkbank.org/;
MacWhinney, 2000, 2014; MacWhinney & Snow, 1985). Further, Childes-db (Sanchez et al.,
2019) is an open database and associated tools that was developed to increase accessibility
and usability of the thousands of transcripts of natural parent-child interaction that are contained
within the CHILDES database. Like CHILDES, Homebank is an online repository for recordings
of child language with the focus of sharing daylong, naturalistic audio recordings along with
metadata (e.g., family demographic information, transcriptions, output of automated speech
processing programs), and tools - such as ACLEW-DARCLE Annotation Scheme and
HomeBankCode - for annotating and analyzing these large corpora
(https://homebank.talkbank.org/; VanDam et al., 2016). Unlike CHILDES, however, Homebank
implements strict user restrictions (e.g., files are stored in a password-protected format and
accessible only to those who have agreed to confidentiality guidelines and have passed
approved ethical training courses), as the daylong audio recordings it houses may be likely to
contain personally identifying information about the families recorded. Finally, Databrary is a
data library based at New York University that aims to “support data sharing among researchers
in the behavioral, social, educational, developmental, neural, and computer sciences”
(https://nyu.databrary.org/; Databrary, 2012; Gilmore et al., 2018). Databrary stores audio and
video files as well as many other types of experimental and demographic data along with an
accompanying tool for data coding and visualization (Datavyu, Datavyu Team, 2014). Access to
files stored on Databrary can be restricted to any “Authorized Investigators” (e.g., researchers
who have approval from their own institutions to access Databrary), shared only with explicit
approval of the data owner, or kept completely private.

The ethical considerations when sharing data from descriptive studies are frequently more
pronounced than sharing data from experimental studies. While sharing full video or audio files
best satisfies the goals of openness and transparency, this comes with a variety of issues
surrounding participant confidentiality and privacy (see Cychosz et al., 2020; Gilmore et al.,
2020, 2021). Video and audio files frequently contain identifiable information like faces or names
that cannot be as easily omitted as they can in experimental data files. Further, video and audio
recordings collected in participants’ homes and the surrounding community may raise additional
concerns about protecting the privacy of not only the participants who have consented to be part
of the study, but also individuals they may naturally encounter during the recording, but who
may not have consented to being recorded. These issues have received extensive
consideration by organizations that facilitate the sharing of video and audio recordings. For

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example, Databrary (Databrary, 2012; Gilmore et al., 2018) provides templates and guidelines
for obtaining parental informed consent. Both Databrary and Homebank (VanDam et al., 2016)
offer various levels of data sharing, enabling researchers to decide whether to make data
publicly available, or only available only to researchers who have specifically requested access
to a particular corpus.

Two additional concerns may arise concerning when to share data. From a practical
perspective, it can feel overwhelming to think about how to find the time to prepare data for
sharing along with all of the other tasks that come with collecting a corpus and preparing a
paper for submission. However, the time costs associated with making audio and video data
open can be minimized if researchers start from the beginning with the intention to share. For
example, videos and associated metadata can be immediately uploaded to a private Databrary
or Homebank repository once parental consent is received. By the time data from all sessions
are collected or the researcher is ready to make the data open, the repository will be ready for
sharing. Additionally, collecting and annotating a corpus is an enormous endeavor that requires
a great deal of time, technical, and intellectual effort, and it is still not clear how to appropriately
credit those who do the extensive work of creating a large corpus (e.g., Gennetian et al., 2022).
Thus, it may be desirable to embargo data (i.e., wait to share until the creators of the corpus
have fully met their research goals). Alternatively, researchers can limit what they make
available (e.g., audio but not video files or annotations alone) until they are ready to share the
entire corpus or share the corpus only with those who have contacted them directly to request
access. While it may be optimal to share data from the start, these alternatives allow
researchers to openly share data in the way that works best for them.

Final considerations

Throughout this paper, we have discussed various practices that increase the openness and
transparency of descriptive research and, in conclusion, we articulate a number of final
considerations: (1) Implementing all of these guidelines at once can be overwhelming, and it is
likely that our list does not even include all possible practices for increasing openness and
transparency (for example, while not typically considered a component of open science, detailed
information about the characteristics of a sample both increases transparency and reduces
inappropriate generalization of findings). However, it is important to acknowledge that engaging
in even one practice that increases transparency is a step in the right direction, and additional
practices can be incrementally added over time (Bergmann, 2018; Corker, 2018; Nuijten, 2019;
Syed, 2019; Kathawalla et al., 2021). (2) It should be acknowledged that these practices
increase transparency more broadly, not just in descriptive work. For example, sharing videos
also increases transparency and the ability to replicate experimental studies and the necessity
of introspection and analysis of researchers' own positionality extends to all domains of
research. (3) Our suggestions for open-science practices in descriptive research were informed
by and adapted from practices that were predominantly targeted toward experimental studies. A
useful future endeavor would be to essentially “start from scratch,” ignoring all previous open-
science recommendations and generating an entirely new conceptualization of what open
science means in descriptive research. (4) Finally, we encourage readers to refrain from making

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assumptions about the quality of work based only on the presence or absence of open-science
practices (Simmons et al., 2021). Papers that check all of the boxes for open science can still be
problematic, and many wonderful papers exist that implement few or no open-science practices.
Regardless of open-science practices, readers should evaluate all available information when
assessing the quality of scientific research.

Conclusion

Descriptive research is important for a variety of reasons: describing behaviors and phenomena,
constructing hypotheses, generating ideas for experiments, informing computational models of
input and output, and answering questions about differences and similarities across groups,
communities, or cultures. Doing descriptive research in a way that is open and transparent
promotes reproducibility, enhances readers’ ability to interpret results, and sets up other
researchers to answer similar research questions in ways that are consistent across labs (e.g.,
using existing coding methods and/or existing data). In this paper, we discuss four practices for
increasing transparency: preregistration, justifying sample size, making coding procedures
open, and sharing video and audio data. For each practice, we describe the benefits of
openness and transparency and make suggestions for how to implement open-science
practices. Throughout, we discuss various ongoing challenges that we hope will prompt
thoughtful practices by researchers who want to do open, transparent descriptive research. In
summary, descriptive research is vital to developmental science. Openness and transparency
improve the reliability and replicability of descriptive work, thus increasing confidence in
research findings. Perhaps more importantly, though, is that the practice of sharing procedures,
data, and tools allows researchers to learn from one another and work together to advance
fundamental understanding of early learning and development.

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