Methodology
8 posts tagged with “Methodology”
Two ways to study misinformation in a browser: what recent paradigm designs actually do
Two 2026 Scientific Reports papers, both built in lab.js, take opposite routes to the same problem. One streams real news as it is published and has a language model generate the false variants; the other renders a classic laboratory paradigm as Instagram posts and manipulates the like counts. Both are worth reading as engineering, not only as findings.
17 August 2026
Piloting before you launch: what Preview, Test run, and Try demo each check
Open Lab has three separate ways to run a study before participants do, and they check different things. Preview shows one task in its current editor state, Test run auto-plays it and reports mechanical failures, and Try demo walks the whole flow end to end. None saves data, and completion codes, link parameters, condition balance and quality signals appear only on a real participant link.
10 August 2026
Running one paradigm across language groups: what Open Lab translates and what stays your job
Collecting the same task from German, Portuguese, and Japanese samples does not require a separate study per language. Translations attach to the task rather than the study, each participant's browser selects the version they see, and the parts that still need scientific judgment — stimulus equivalence, back-translation, language-group analysis — remain yours.
3 August 2026
RT precision in the browser: what online studies can (and can't) measure
Browser-based experiments add tens of milliseconds of lag to every response, but lag and noise are separate problems and only one of them usually affects your result. What external timing measurements actually show, which paradigms are genuinely constrained online, and the design choices that reduce the cost.
27 July 2026
Between-subjects randomization for online studies
Multi-condition designs raise one question everything else hangs on: where does the randomization actually happen? A concrete guide to splitting the work — assign the condition at the study level in Open Lab, randomize the order within it in the lab.js task — and to why Open Lab's minimization-based assignment keeps your groups balanced even at small samples.
20 July 2026
Running a lab.js experiment online, end-to-end
A start-to-finish walkthrough of taking a behavioural experiment online — build the task in lab.js, wrap it as a study in Open Lab, recruit participants, and export clean data to analyse — held together by the Task → Study → Project model.
13 July 2026
Can you trust web-collected data? Bots, inattentive responders, and what paradata can (and can't) tell you
You launch an online study and sessions arrive overnight — but how many are from real, attentive people? A practical, honest look at the two different problems (automated fraud and inattentive humans), the defences researchers actually use, and where process-level quality signals fit.
7 July 2026
Running a study in kiosk mode: what the methods literature says about one shared device, many participants
Between the controlled lab and the open web sits a third setting — one shared station where people take part one after another, in person. Here is what the web-experimental methods literature actually supports about doing it well, and how Open Lab's Box / kiosk mode maps onto it.
1 July 2026