Many experimental psychologists now prefer to conduct (at least some of) their research online thanks to the explosive expansion of this field over the past few years. On the one hand, it promises to free the researcher from conventional Western, educated, industrialized, wealthy, and democratic limitations. In general, such data gathering can be accomplished by the experimenters in question with little to no extra work.

On the other hand, there have been concerns raised about the lack of control over a number of variables, including the unavoidable lack of control over the precise parameters of stimulus presentation (for instance, screen resolution/display characteristics), as well as the absence of experimenter supervision of the participants while they were taking part in these studies. The frequency with which purportedly anonymized data appears online while still retaining information that can, both directly and indirectly, identify the identity of the participant, is another cause for concern.

However, despite these many issues and restrictions, the number of studies that have been published in recent years using online testing has increased dramatically and quickly. We contend that many of the wants of control that one faces as an experimenter can be more than made up for by the much bigger sample sizes and the much greater diversity of such samples that one normally attracts when engaged online (as opposed to lab-based) testing. In fact, a variety—or even the majority—of future psychological studies in the field of perception research design may find it attractive, not to mention economically advantageous, to conduct large-scale studies online in conjunction with lab-based experiments that offer finer control over the testing situation and stimuli. However, at the moment, these investigations are only able to provide visual and aural inputs.

target audience and the article’s general structure

Our objective in writing this essay is to give those perception scientists who are thinking about using this potent new research approach to augment their own lab-based studies an up-to-date review of the benefits and drawbacks of conducting research online. We have concentrated on issues of the present, mainly those that emerged after 2011. In order to give the interested reader a solid foundation and critically assess the drawbacks and advantages of internet research, we expand on several previously addressed concerns in this article. First, we point out how much more representative of the general population online participants are than their lab-based counterparts, as well as how quick and affordable data gathering can be done online. Then, we examine the numerous issues that have been brought up in relation to online research, concentrating on timing-related problems and how the wide range of hardware and software that one’s participants may use can result in data issues. The prevalent worry that participants themselves won’t be adequately supervised is also addressed. We quickly discuss some of the ethical concerns related to the internet. research, despite the fact that they merit their own paper. We also include a summary of the primary online testing services that are currently accessible to researchers. We conclude by identifying what we believe to be the most promising areas for future research and by offering some general conclusions.

Online Research Has Many Advantages.

The advantages of online research (conducted on a computer with internet access) versus more conventional lab-based investigations will be discussed in this section (our focus is primarily on computer-based research, but we briefly mention smartphones in a later section). We focus on the advantages that more representative and diverse participant samples, efficient data gathering methods, and straightforward participant payment procedures can bring to online research.

Large participant pools are easily accessible.

The ability to quickly and easily gather vast amounts of data is one of the most significant benefits of conducting research online. In lab-based trials, subjects are often tested one at a time, in small groups, or over a period of days, weeks, or even months. Unfortunately, this in-person testing of participants can introduce noise due to, for example, differences in how the task is explained (though see the article by Mirams et al., 2013, where the researchers attempted to avoid this problem by, among other things, ensuring that each participant received their instruction through an audio-recording) or even simple demographic differences can affect performance on psychological tasks. The most significant of these is that research assistants and researchers might provide participants with subtly inadvertent indications about how to respond to the task at hand (. Any in-lab psychology study includes a social psychological component, as noted by Orne more than 50 years ago (perhaps surprisingly, this has not received much attention in recent years). Furthermore, it takes time to schedule individuals, and depending on the particular participant pool, there can be a large number of participants who fail to show up or who arrive after their scheduled experimental session has begun. Nevertheless, perception research design currently, premium applications like SonaSystems and Experimetrix assist by automating much of the registration process and having the ability to send out reminder emails. Likewise, see the soon-to-be-available open-source LabMan toolbox. Due to limitations on experimenter flexibility and available space for experimental setups, it can be challenging to run numerous participants in parallel in much lab-based research.

recruitment platform

In contrast, when using the right recruitment platform (which is the subject of the following section), a study can be conducted online with a large number of participants at any given moment. Additionally, the academic year’s whims do not constrain participant availability. With involvement in many university contexts, contexts are far more common during term times than outside of term times. It should be noted that more people participate in online studies outside of term time, which is probably correlated with more students trying to make money. In contrast to the online environment, where the possible participant pool appears to be more than broad enough to fully answer most topics, there might be significant problems connected with scaling up one’s sample size in the lab setting. A further useful advantage of conducting research online is that the payment of participants is frequently automated; as a result, the researcher only needs to make one payment rather than many and does not need to gather hundreds of individual receipts from participants, minimizing their interaction with their financial department.

platforms for hiring

The most well-known of the several internet tools available for participant recruiting is perhaps Mechanical. A growing number of psychological studies have begun to use the service in recent years, which provides a live feed of several MTurk demographic characteristics, despite the fact that this platform is primarily designed to help those working in the industry hire numerous people to perform tasks related to business (such as classifying photos or rating website content).