Tag: Research Methods and Tools

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Mechanical Turk’s Hidden Option

Like a lot of social scientists, I use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for recruiting participants for some of my experiments.  It’s cheap, fast, and the data quality is about the same as what I’ve seen with student subjects and professional online recruiters.  In fact, I use Mechanical Turk for a variety of crowdsourcing tasks, such as data entry and proofreading. It’s an amazingly flexible resource, and I’m a big fan.

However, as of this writing in January 2013, Amazon has recently made a change that I need to post a warning about. In essence, Amazon has changed their requester interface to make “master” workers a secret, opt-out option.  If your MTurk project isn’t working well, this might be the reason. Continue reading “Mechanical Turk’s Hidden Option”

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Qualtrics branching based on the average of a multiple-item scale

In a recent project, I identified a work-around for one of the limitations of Qualtrics.  In my situation, I had a three-item scale from a published source (each item measured on a 1-to-7 response scale), and I had a series of follow-up questions that I wanted to ask, but only if the person had averaged 2 or more on the three-item scale.  In other words, I wanted to have a skip pattern based on the average of three previous responses.  Qualtrics makes it easy to have a skip pattern based on the result of one previous response (with the “add skip logic” function shown here).  However, the “add skip logic” in Qualtrics is not flexible enough to do branching based on a combination of previous responses.

A work-around for this limitation Continue reading “Qualtrics branching based on the average of a multiple-item scale”

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Javascript for Qualtrics to alter choice options

Here is some Javascript code for altering the current question’s multiple-choice options based on the respondent’s answer to a previous multiple-choice question. Specifically, this code considers the response given to a previous question and modifies the current question to remove any answer options that are lower than the previous response. [Note: I hard-coded the number of options as 10. If there are fewer than 10, it will not throw an error.]

Continue reading “Javascript for Qualtrics to alter choice options”

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The CSS I add to a new Qualtrics survey

To my eye, the “page width” used by Qualtrics with most of their themes is too narrow. Even on a small-screen laptop, it leaves a lot of side margin.  The issue isn’t merely aesthetic; a wider screen gives me a little more room for wider labels above closed-ended response options.

I use the following CSS code to give a little more width to the space Qualtrics uses for survey questions. This code is added in Qualtrics “Look & Feel,” under “Style.”

Continue reading “The CSS I add to a new Qualtrics survey”

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The embedded data setup that I always use with Qualtrics

When I do a Qualtrics q’re, this is the embedded data setup I always use. This setup …

  • imports the participant’s country (as inferred from the IP address)
  • writes the start date and time in a format that’s easier to deal with than the default format
  • creates a variable in the data called “on_mobile” that records “Yes” if the participant is using a mobile device (as inferred by Qualtrics)
  • writes the MTurk Worker ID. This one is unique to my setup, but everything else here will work for anyone.

Continue reading “The embedded data setup that I always use with Qualtrics”