Issues with building an experiment from scratch

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  • #930
    Dimitra
    Guest

    Dear QRTEngineers,

    I would like first to thank you for offering this powerful engine.
    I am post-doc at the University of Cambridge and we want to use Qualtrics to collect both judgment and RT data, so your solution looks very promising. This is the first I am using an online platform to set up an experiment.

    I’ve followed your tutorial ‘Building an experiment from scratch’, but I got stuck at some points, so I thought to ask for your help.

    According to the tutorial, we need 3 different questions: Init, Stimulus and Exit. I understand how to create them and add the Javascript. I don’t understand though how I would change the stimuli to add mine.
    Our stimuli look like this:

    First display: A sentence (descriptive text)
    Second display: Another sentence. (descriptive text)
    Third display: A truth value judgement task (YES/NO) on what has been read in display 2.

    The 3 displays need to be treated as a whole, so I think I would use a block to make them stick together before randomizing. We want to collect timing data for each display separately.

    Question 1: Is that doable with the QRTEngine?
    Question 2: When I insert my stimuli, should I keep one Init question in the beginning of the experiment and one Exit question at the end of the experiment or should I have one Init question and one Exit question before and after each block?
    Question 3: Can I use a .txt file to insert my data or should I do this manually?
    Question 4: Do I need the Loop and Merge feature to set this up?

    Thank you very much in advance,
    Hope you can help me,

    Best wishes from Cambridge,
    Dimitra

    #948
    Erwin Haasnoot
    Keymaster

    Hi Dimitra,

    Sorry for the late response.

    What you want to do with the QRTEngine should definitely be possible. I’ll answer your question in order :).

    Question 1: Yes

    Question 2: You should create a block that starts with an Init question and ends with an Exit question. Any questions between that should be Stimulus questions without page breaks between them. The QRTEngine will advance through these blocks in the way defined by your configurations, which you should put into the Init question’s JavaScript. Please note that you’re allowed to have any number of Stimulus questions between the Init & Exit questions, so in your case you’ll have three. One for the first sentence, one for the second and then one for the truth value judgement part. Just as you would use the editor to create your questionnaire questions, you can use the editor to create your stimuli!

    Question 3: I’m not sure what you mean by this. You can use the Loop & Merge to “pipe” in text to your stimuli (such as the sentence text). The stimulus data as such can be managed in a spreadsheet editor (Excel, google spreadsheet) and then copy pasted into the Loop & Merge spreadsheet.

    Question 4: We strongly advise you to do so, as the QRTEngine has been made with that specific design pattern in mind. You can only get one trial per run through a block and Loop & Merge allows you to repeat blocks a set amount of times.

    We hope this helps, if you have any remaining questions, do not hesitate to ask!

    Best Regards,

    Erwin Haasnoot

    #950
    Dimitra
    Guest

    Hi Erwin,

    thank you very much for your reply.

    Before continuing with more questions on your reply, could you please briefly explain why you think your engine would work better than the Timing component already present in Qualtrics? I’ve been told in the meanwhile that for simple designs like the one we have (only words, no images/videos to load), the timing component might be sufficient?

    Reply to Q1: Good to hear that!

    Reply to Q2: Thank you for explaining that the Stimulus questions can be multiple, that’s very helpful. That means then that each block would have the following structure, is that right?
    Init
    Stimulus 1
    Stimulus 2
    Stimulus 3
    Exit
    Would the Init/Exit questions have any content and would the participant see them?
    You say that “The QRTEngine will advance through these blocks in the way defined by your configurations, which you should put into the Init question’s JavaScript.” Do you mean by ‘my configurations’ how long each stimulus will be displayed? The issue here is that we do not want to *limit* the amount of time each stimulus will be displayed, we rather want to *measure* how long the participant will take to read it and progress to the next page.

    Reply to Q3: What I mean by that is that Qualtrics has an option of Importing a text file in order to save you the time of manually adding each question. I just saw now on their website that they say this would work if I had a back-end program that automatically generates .TXT surveys, which I don’t. Anyway, the issue here is we have multiple lists in our experiment and I don’t want to type in each question on each list. Do you think that it would work if I prepare a spreadsheet for each list and then use the Loop & Merge feature? Regarding the spreadsheet should it look like this (using one example to illustrate):
    Column 1 Column 2 Column 3
    London is big. London is in the UK. Do you agree with the statement?

    Further, I do not understand where I should enter the following piece of code beginning with the $ sign: ‘the data from each column can be input into your stimuli by entering ${lm://Field/1} for column 1, ${lm://Field/2} for column 2, etc.’

    Thank you very much in advance and please excuse my ignorance!

    Best wishes,
    Dimitra

    #977
    Dimitra
    Guest

    Dear Erwin,

    sorry to insist, but did you have a chance to look at my questions above?

    I hope you are having a wonderful holiday,
    best wishes,
    dimitra

    #1227
    Dimitra
    Guest

    Dear Erwin,

    I was wondering if you could provide some help with Loop and Merge. Specifically, I would like to know whether Loop and Merge would create new blocks and would pipe the text from the spreadsheet. I cannot seem to make it work. I have the default block, which I designed following your instructions and then I want to add new blocks and insert all of my stimuli using the following structure for each block:
    Init
    Stimulus 1
    Stimulus 2
    Stimulus 3
    Exit

    Could you please advise me?
    Thank you,
    Best wishes,
    Dimitra

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