Milestone 4: Your research contract, v0
This milestone chapter is part of a book in active development and has not yet been through the author’s review. Content may change as the review advances.
This chapter closes Studio 4: Declare and diagnose provisionally. Its lessons each ended at It is your turn; what you wrote there arrives here as working material, and this is where the pieces become one artifact you can defend.
What this milestone produces. Research Contract v0 — objective, target estimand, population, setting and time, data strategy, a provisional operationalization you mark for revision, warrant, answer strategy and uncertainty statement — plus the design properties you diagnosed (its bias, its wobble, and how often it would detect what you are looking for), your permission status, and a redesign record. Measurement proper is taught and assessed in Studio 6; here you only commit to a starting choice and say why it is defensible for now.
What you bring
You also carry forward the last milestone’s artifact: Milestone 3: Your evidence base. This one builds on it, and the chain assumes it is versioned and filed.
Check you are carrying each of these before you start. If one is missing, go back and work that lesson’s It is your turn first; the practice below assumes it.
- Lesson 10 — Model, Inquiry, Data Strategy, and Answer Strategy: your MIDA declaration: model, inquiry, data strategy, and answer strategy, with the alignment sentence that ties them together — carrying population, setting and time, the provisional operationalization, and the warrant into Contract v0.
- Lesson 11 — Uncertainty Before You Need It: your estimand and estimator, the repeat-run story behind them, your dependence structure, and your uncertainty sentence next to its wrong twin.
- Lesson 12 — Declaring and Diagnosing a Research Design: your design diagnosis: bias, wobble, and power read from simulation, one redesign, and the honest call that followed.
- Lesson 13 — Research Ethics and Data Governance: your declared permission status, your minimised column list, your AI boundary, and your four governance decisions.
The practice
- Write the four MIDA parts of your design so a stranger could run them. (MIDA is Blair, Cooper, Coppock, and Humphreys’ framework, developed at book length in RDSS.)
- State your estimand and estimator, and describe in words what would differ if the procedure ran again.
- Diagnose the design: what is its bias, how much does it wobble, and how often would it detect what you are looking for.
- Run the permission determination and declare one status; if it is anything but cleared, name the authority and the date you asked.
- Minimise your columns against the declared analysis, and check what a re-identification test would find.
- Write the redesign record - what you changed after diagnosing, and why. A diagnosis that changed nothing is a diagnosis you should distrust.
A version, not a pass
Your milestone artifact is a dated, numbered version with the reason for the version attached. When later evidence changes it, you write the next version rather than editing the last one, because the sequence of changes is itself part of your research record.
The four rails, here
Four concerns cross every studio in this book. At this milestone they take these specific forms.
- Ethics, permissions, and data exposure. The permission status produced here gates every later studio; nothing downstream may proceed past a stop.
- Evidence, provenance, and reproducibility. Your data strategy names actual sources from the Studio 3 registry, not source types.
- AI activity, verification, and human decisions. Diagnosis is delegable; the choice of what to fix is not.
- Uncertainty, claim boundary, and revision history. This is where your uncertainty statement is first written down and first tested.
Where this milestone sits
You arrived carrying Milestone 3: Your evidence base. Milestone 5 commits the contract to one research pathway and writes what that pathway can and cannot establish. The chain ends at Milestone 12: Your release and next cycle, where you decide whether your finished research artifact leaves your hands.
What sends you back
Route diagnosis, measurement changes, permission rulings, and the realized data each produce a new Contract version with its reason.
How this milestone is assessed
Each row scores 0, 1, or 2. 10 points total.
| # | Criterion | 0 | 1 | 2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The milestone artifact exists in full, specific to your own project | absent, or generic text that would fit any project | present but incomplete, or specific in some parts and generic in others | complete and unmistakably about your project |
| 2 | The milestone is written as a dated, numbered version with its reason | no version, or a version with no reason given | versioned, but the reason is decorative rather than an account of what changed | versioned with a reason a reader could use to reconstruct your thinking |
| 3 | Every judgment in the artifact is defended by you, not asserted by a tool | conclusions appear with no reasoning, or reproduce a tool’s wording | reasoning present but thin where the decision was hardest | each judgment carries a reason you could defend under questioning |
| 4 | The four rails are carried in the form this studio requires | one or more rails absent where this studio required them | all rails present but one is nominal | every rail addressed in the form this studio requires |
| 5 | The milestone’s own product is present and defensible: Research Contract v0 — objective, target estimand, population, setting and time, data strategy, a provisional operationalization marked for revision, warrant, answer strategy and uncertainty statement — plus the design properties you diagnosed (its bias, its wobble, and how often it would detect what you are looking for), your permission status, and a redesign record | the milestone’s own product is missing | present but would not survive a careful question | present and defensible as stated |
No work at or after Studio 4 proceeds past a not-authorized determination. This is not scored and cannot be averaged away.
Your workbook
Open the workbook with the badge above. It walks these steps with a cell for each one, ends by writing your milestone version with its reason, and adds the rows this studio contributes to your AI Research Ledger and your Research Dossier.