by Ulf-Dietrich Reips
published 2009 in Human Vision and Electronic Imaging XIV 7240(1), 724008. (Invited paper by the SPIE-IS&T Science and Technology Electronic Imaging societies)
The Internet experiment is now a well-established and widely used method. The present paper describes guidelines for... more
The Internet experiment is now a well-established and widely used method. The present paper describes guidelines for the proper conduct of Internet experiments, e.g. handling of dropout, unobtrusive naming of materials, and pre-testing. Several methods are presented that further increase the quality of Internet experiments and help to avoid frequent errors. These methods include the "seriousness check", "warm-up," "high hurdle," and "multiple site entry" techniques, control of multiple submissions, and control of motivational confounding. Finally, metadata from sites like WEXTOR (http://wextor.org) and the web experiment list (http://wexlist.net/) are reported that show the current state of Internet-based research in terms of the distribution of fields, topics, and research designs used.
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