Question: What kind of procedures did you use to conduct your research?

Rose Turner answered on 13 Jun 2017:

Hi Emily!
For a recent study I carried out a survey online. There is a program called Qualtrics that I used to create questionnaires. I created the questionnaires based on ones that already exist (and are widely used in Psychology) and added a few questions of my own too. On Qualtrics, you can also add tests, multiple choice answers, and text boxes, and there are lots of other features like putting a timer on the page (so you can check whether someone actually paid attention of whether they skipped through it!) and you can provide feedback in the form of percentages and charts (e.g. if you want to give participants the added incentive of knowing how well they did at a particular questionnaire.) I advertised the link to the survey on our university participation website (where students can take part in experiments in return for course credit) and on social media platforms where it could be shared to the wider public.

Another approach I have been using is experimentation. I have been bringing participants one at a time into a lab (“lab” is just the posh scientific word we use for the tiny windowless rooms we have for our experiments – they’re not really like the sorts of labs you would imagine with test tubes and bunsen burners etc – they’re more like tiny offices). There, I set participants up at a computer and give them some paperwork to do (they give informed consent on paper and I have given them some pen and paper exercises and a story to read on paper). It’s good being in a room with them because I can answer any questions they might have and make sure they don’t try to google the answers! 😉 One test I use is called the ‘author recognition test’. It’s a list of author names, but some of them are made-up names. Participants have to select the names they recognise (the fake ones are included so they don’t try to guess). It is assumed that the more names they know, the more they have read, so the test is considered to reflect ‘lifetime fiction exposure’. I used it in both the online survey and the lab experiment – the risk with the online survey is that participants might have secretly looked up the answers! But the online approach saves me a lot of time as I don’t have to be there when participation is happening 🙂