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Advanced Methods for Conducting Online Behavioral Research

Publication date: January 2010
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Overview

The Internet is revolutionizing the way psychologists conduct behavioral research. Studies conducted online are not only less error-prone and labor-intensive but also rapidly reach large numbers of diverse participants at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods. In addition to improving the efficiency and accuracy of data collection, online studies provide automatic data storage and deliver immediate personalized feedback to research participants—a major incentive that can exponentially expand participant pools. Furthermore, behavioral researchers can also track data on online behavioral phenomena, including Instant Messaging (IM), social networking, and other social media.

This book goes beyond the basics to teach readers advanced methods for conducting behavioral research on the Internet. Short chapters offer practical advice by leading experts in key domains of Internet research. Readers are shown, step by step, how to conduct online experiments, surveys, and ability testing, use advanced graphic tools such as drag-and-drop objects, apply automatic text analysis tools, check the validity of protocols, automate the storage and analysis of data, record "field notes" on the behavior of online subjects and chatroom or blogging communities, and much more. Chapters also address critical issues such as data security, ethics, participant recruitment, and how to ensure the completion of tests or questionnaires. This volume also features supplemental resources, links, scripts, and instructions to further assist readers with their online research. See the supplemental materials tab for details.

This book is designed for researchers and advanced graduate students in the behavioral sciences seeking greater technical detail about emerging research methods. Readers will be well equipped to implement and integrate these exciting new methods into their own Internet-based behavioral research effectively, securely, and responsibly.

Table of contents

Contributors

I. Getting Started

  1. How to Use This Book
    —John A. Johnson and Samuel D. Gosling
  2. An Overview of Major Techniques of Web-Based Research
    —Michael H. Birnbaum

II. Considerations When Designing Web Pages

  1. Design and Formatting in Internet-Based Research
    —Ulf-Dietrich Reips
  2. Using Graphics, Photographs, and Dynamic Media
    —John H. Krantz and John E. Williams
  3. Drag & Drop: A Flexible Method for Moving Objects, Implementing Rankings, and a Wide Range of Other Applications
    —Wolfgang Neubarth

III. Studying Internet Behavior

  1. Collecting Data From Social Networking Web Sites and Blogs
    —Elizabeth Mazur
  2. Using Automated "Field Notes" to Observe the Behavior of Online Subjects
    —Sonja Utz
  3. Automatic Text Analysis
    —Matthias R. Mehl and Alastair J. Gill

IV. Transporting Traditional Methodologies to the Web

  1. Internet-Based Ability Testing
    —Ulrich Schroeders, Oliver Wilhelm, and Stefan Schipolowski
  2. Web-Based Self-Report Personality Scales
    —John A. Johnson
  3. Online Collection of Informant Reports
    —Simine Vazire
  4. Conducting Online Surveys
    —Tracy L. Tuten
  5. Conducing True Experiments on the Web
    —Ulf-Dietrich Reips and John H. Krantz

V. Cross-Cutting Issues

  1. Using Lotteries, Loyalty Points, and Other Incentives to Increase Participant Response and Completion
    —Anja S. Göritz
  2. Security and Data Protection: Collection, Storage, and Feedback in Internet Research
    —Olaf Thiele and Lars Kaczmirek
  3. Ethical Issues in Psychological Research on the Internet
    —Tom Buchanan and John E. Williams

Index

About the Editors

Contributor bios

Samuel D. Gosling, PhD, is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He has been using the Internet to collect data since the mid 1990s, when he created a questionnaire to collect personality ratings of pets by their owners. Since then, he has published numerous articles that make use of data collected on the Internet; these articles focus on such diverse topics as personality change over the life span, the links between music preferences and personality, geographic variation in psychological traits, and perceptions of others based on their Web sites and their online social networking profiles (e.g., Facebook). His 2004 American Psychologist article focused on evaluating the pros and cons of Internet methods.

Dr. Gosling's substantive research has focused on animal personality and on how human personality is manifested in everyday contexts like bedrooms, offices, clothing, Web pages, and music preferences. The latter topic was summarized in his book, Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You (2008).

Dr. Gosling is a recipient of an American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution.

John A. Johnson, PhD, is a professor of psychology at the Pennsylvania State University, DuBois. He also serves as the consultant for the International Personality Item Pool, a Web-based repository for psychological measures in the public domain. He entered the field of computer-assisted psychological research in 1986, when he wrote microcomputer programs for scoring and interpreting the Hogan Personality Inventory. When the World Wide Web emerged in the 1990s, he transported concepts from these programs to the Web. He has published research on assessing the validity of data collected on the Internet and on sharing data through Web-based collaboratories.

Book details
Format: Hardcover
Publication date: January 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4338-0695-7
Item #: 4311014
Pages: 286
Supplemental Materials

This content was submitted by the authors as supplemental material for Advanced Methods for Conducting Online Behavioral Research.

The material is offered for personal use but the reader is expected to respect the intellectual property of the authors and the copyright holder. Content should not be reprinted or adapted for publication without permission from the authors and the copyright holder.

Chapter 2

An Overview of Major Techniques of Web-Based Research
Michael Birnbaum

Examples from the Text

Links to Additional Resources Discussed in Text

  • Advanced Training Institutes in Psychology Experiments via the WWW
    http://psych.hanover.edu/NSFATI/
    Instructional materials by J. H. Krantz for the creation and editing of media
  • Psychological Research on the Net
    http://psych.hanover.edu/Research/exponnet.html
    A site that lists known psychological experiments on the Internet that can be utilized as way to recruit volunteer participants.
  • How to Conduct Behavioral Research over the Internet
    http://www.web-research-design.net/
    This is the supplementary site for R. Fraley’s How to Conduct Behavioral Research over the Internet: A Beginner's Guide to HTML and CGI/Perl (2004). Various resources, examples, and more are available on it.
  • WWW Survey Assistant
    http://www.mohsho.com/s_ware/how.html (site no longer available)
    Everything you need to get your survey or test up and running on the web. No programming experience required!
  • Tools for Internet-based Data Collection
    https://www.psychology.uzh.ch/en.html
    A repository of tools for Web experimenters.

Chapter 3

Design and Formatting in Internet-Based Research
Ulf-Dietrich Reips

Examples from the Text

  • Web Survey List
    http://wexlist.net/
    Intended to be the world's most comprehensive archive of current and past psychological Web experiments
  • WEXTOR
    http://wextor.org
    WEXTOR is a Web-based tool that lets you quickly design and visualize laboratory experiments and Web experiments in a guided step-by-step process.
  • VAS Generator
    http://vasgenerator.net
    A free tool to create VAS for Internet-based research.
  • Surveymonkey
    http://surveymonkey.com
    Intelligent survey software for primates of all species. SurveyMonkey has a single purpose: to enable anyone to create professional online surveys quickly and easily.
  • Unipark
    http://unipark.com
    EFS Survey is the online research tool of choice for over 300 businesses worldwide. Its friendly web-based interface allows users to create high quality surveys with minimal effort.
  • iScience Server
    http://www.iscience.eu
    A portal with a number of useful services in Internet-based research.

Chapter 4

Using Graphics, Photographs, and Dynamic Media
John Krantz and John E. Willams

Chapter 5

Drag and Drop: A Flexible Method for Moving Objects, Implementing Rankings, and a Wide Range of Other Applications
Wolfgang Neubarth

Measurement of moveable objects

Teaching Example

Chapter 6

Collecting Data from Social Networking Websites and Blogs
Elizabeth Mazur

Ancillary Links

Chapter 7

Using Automated "Field Notes" to Observe the Behavior of Online Subjects
Sonja Utz

Chapter 8

Automatic Text Analysis
Matthias Mehl and Alastair Gill

Chapter 9

Internet-Based Ability Testing
Ulrich Schroeders, Oliver Wilhelm, and Stefan Schipolowski

Programming

  • XAMPP
  • PHP Freaks
    http://www.phpfreaks.com/
    This site offers a great collection of articles about PHP programming, a code library, tutorials, and forums where you can post questions.
  • MySQL
    http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/6.0/en/index.html
    You can use the MySQL 6.0 reference manual (located here) to look up the MySQL syntax, for instance, on how to write different types of data to your database.
  • PHP: Documentation
    http://www.php.net/docs.php
    Here you can find the official PHP documentation.
  • phpMyAdmin
    http://www.phpmyadmin.net
    On this site you can get additional information about the program phpMyAdmin that is an easy to use tool for creating, editing, and exporting MySQL databases.
  • Java SE Desktop Technologies
    http://java.sun.com/products/javawebstart
    On Java’s official site you can inform yourself about the Java Web Start technology if you are interested in accurately recording reaction times.

Web Sites for Recruiting Participants

Chapter 10

Web-Based Self-Report Personality Scales
John Johnson

Chapter 11

Online Collection of Informant Reports
Simine Vazire

  • Collecting Informat Reports
    http://www.simine.com/informants.html
    A page developed by Dr. Vazire containing information for researchers interested in collecting informant reports for their research.
  • WorldMerge
    http://www.coloradosoft.com/worldmrg
    A program that allows you to use a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet as input and send out hundreds of individualized e-mails from your own e-mail account with the push of a button.

Chapter 12

Conducting Online Surveys
Tracy L. Tuten

Chapter 13

Conducting True Experiments on the Web
Ulf-Dietrich Reips and John Krantz

Metasite

  • iScience Server
    http://iscience.eu
    This is a free portal to many of the services mentioned below. Hosted by Reips at the University of Deusto in Bilbao, Spain – after three years at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Study Generators and Editors

  • WEXTOR
    http://wextor.org
    This free Web application with small fee for comfort features, creates laboratory experiments and Web experiments and will work with between-subjects, within-subjects, quasi-experimental, and mixed designs. Many techniques important to Web research are built in. Its user friendly step-by-step process is also great for teaching students. WEXTOR stores and hosts the experimental designs, so you can work on and run your experiments using any type of browser from any computer.
  • FactorWiz
    http://psych.fullerton.edu/mbirnbaum/programs/factorWiz.htm
    This freeware generates HTML pages to conduct within-subject factorial experiments with random order of conditions.
  • VAS Generator
    http://www.vasgenerator.net/
    This freeware easily creates visual analogue scales for Web use.
  • Generic HTML Form Processor
    http://www.goeritz.net/brmic/
    This “Citeware” collects data from Web questionnaires using PHP.
  • Scientific LogAnalyzer
    http://sclog.eu
    This program is free for small log files in academic use and can analyze any type of log file. It also does dropout analysis.

Examples, Recruitment, and Archiving

  • Decision Research Center
    http://psych.fullerton.edu/mbirnbaum/decisions/thanks.htm
    Several student experiments that are research projects in judgment and decision making, supervised by Michael Birnbaum, one of the leading experts in Internet-based data collection. He writes on the Web page introducing the Decision Research Center: “As with any content you find on the Internet, after you link to a study, you should read the materials and decide for yourself if you want to participate.”
  • Psychological Research on the Net (“Exponnet site”)
    http://psych.hanover.edu/research/exponnet.html
    One of the most comprehensive Web sites listing online psychology related studies. The Web site is maintained by the second author at Hanover College.
  • Socialpsychology Network
    http://www.socialpsychology.org/expts.htm
    A Web site devoted to listing Internet-based data collection efforts specifically in the area of social psychology.
  • Web Experiment List
    http://wexlist.net
    Together with the “Exponnet list” mentioned above this is the largest list of Internet-based research studies on the Web. Researchers can fill in their own studies to be listed. Studies can be searched by category, language, status (active or not), and type (experiment or correlational study).
  • Web Experimental Psychology Lab
    http://wexlab.eu
    This was the first virtual laboratory with real data collection via experiments on the World Wide Web, founded in 1995 by the first author. Then located at the University of Tübingen, Germany, it moved to the University of Zurich, Switzerland, in 1997, and since 2009 is located at the University of Deusto in Bilbao, Spain.

Chapter 14

Using Lotteries, Loyalty Points, and Other Incentives to Increase Participant Response and Completion
Anja Göritz

Chapter 15

Security and Data Protection: Collection, Storage, and Feedback in Internet Research
Olaf Thiele and Lars Kaczmirek

The following information is only for educational purposes. Readers are fully responsible on their own if they use these links. These products are designed to secure data and can therefore also cause loss of data and restrict access to data. The authors should not be held liable if such things happen.

Websites

Software Links

Additional Resources

  • Bruce Schneier Blog and Newsletter
    http://www.schneier.com
    Bruce Schneier has written a well known cryptography text book (Applied Cryptography) and offers an excellent blog and newsletter. The Crypto-Gram newsletter has more than 125.000 readers and regularly informs them about security related problems.
  • PHP and MySQL Documentation
    http://www.php.net/manual/en/
    http://mysql.org/doc/
    Both PHP and MySQL offer important great documentation on available functions and commands. Each website has a section where it is possible to add comments to the official documentation, which usually gives good advice on security and other issues. The PHP website offers a good section on overall PHP security. The MySQL documentation presents a shorter section on security, but generally informs well on database subjects.
  • Mailing Lists on Current Vulnerabilities
    http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/
    http://www.cert.org/
    Local CERTs (Computer Emergency Readiness Teams) offer informative official mailing lists on vulnerabilities. The US-CERT offers constantly updated technical information (approx. once a day). Other CERTs can be found on the CERT website.
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