Best Online Research Techniques

Whatever research you intend to do online you do have to start somewhere. The collection and collation of data require you to be organized. You must develop your own research techniques when online and stick to them.

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Internet Research Techniques

Before starting any research on the internet you need to know some of the Pros and cons…

What are the advantages of doing internet research?

• Ability to obtain a large sample, which increases statistical power
• Ability to obtain a more diverse sample than in traditional university-based research
• Prevents experimenter demand effects (with no interaction with the experimenter, no “experimenter expectancy” effect)

What are the disadvantages of doing internet research?

• Some subjects may try to participate in the same study more than once
  1. To overcome this problem, you can ask for the email addresses of each participant and then look for duplicates.
  2. Since nowadays it's easy for people to create multiple email addresses, you can also ask for the name and/or address of each subject. Sometimes researchers will have a “lottery” as an incentive to participate (e.g., $100 lottery prize for every 400 participants), so asking for name/address is necessary to award the lottery check.
  3. You can also collect the IP address of each participant and look for duplicates. One issue here is that sometimes DSL providers give the same IP address to multiple people.
• Some subjects may drop out of the study before finishing
  1. In traditional laboratory-based research, it's unusual for a subject to walk out of a study, but online a subject can get distracted or simply lose interest and end the study. Sometimes researchers will have a “lottery” as an incentive to have the subject participate in the study, but with any type of monetary incentive IRB’s typically require a statement in the consent form saying something to the effect of “you may discontinue participation at any time without any consequences or losing your entry in the lottery.”
  2. Since a certain number of online subjects won't finish the study, you can over-collect the number of subjects you think you need to offset the number of subjects who don't finish the study, usually around 10-20%.
• Some subjects may stop the study and then continue minutes/hours later
  1. The problem here is that some studies involve manipulations which may lose power if there is a time lag between the manipulation and measures in the study. One advantage of online studies is that you can record how long the subject is taking part in the study, so you can identify the average length of time of your study, and also identify those subjects who take an extraordinarily long amount of time to finish the study.