2. Lay Summary

During the production and assessment of high-quality research, it is important to be open about how that research was produced and what can be concluded from it. The FSA set out to develop a ‘good science’ Quality Assurance Toolkit (QAT) to support its members to produce, assess and procure high-quality research. The FSA QAT was developed between February and August 2022 through a process of co-creation. A series of focus groups were held with FSA staff in March 2022. This was followed by a scoping review of internal and external guidance to help populate the QAT. The QAT was iteratively developed through multiple rounds of feedback from the FSA Advisory Committee for Social Science and was piloted on several study protocols, research reports, and tender specifications. The resulting QAT is intended to be easy to use whilst also supporting transparency in how scientific evidence is produced, assessed, and procured, to ensure that quality assurance is consistently applied across research projects and FSA staff.