choosing worker type in JATOS
Hi All,
I am designing an experiment that will be run on JATOS and I am not sure what kind of worker type to choose. Since my experiment will be long, I want to give the participants the possibility of not doing it all at once. I have thought about two ways of doing this: (1) splitting my study in two smaller studies each with two (different) components of my experiment (2) having 4 components in my task and allowing multiple entries.
For Option (1) I would give my participants Personal Single worker links, but the problem is that I will not be able to link the participants across components if these are split across two experiments. Is this true?
In option (2) I would provide the participants with Personal Multiple Worker links, so that they would be able to come back. But, as I gather from the documentation, this type is designed for a longitudinal type of study, the participants would have access to the already completed components. Is there a way to block the previously components completed. Does the "allow reload" option help with this? If I were to uncheck it, would this mean that when they return the coupled component would not be available?
Also, does JATOS save in the results the Personal link that the participants used to access the task? I am asking this because I will have a pre-study with the info and consent form, and if the participant consents all that they will do is provide me their email and I will then send the personal link there. Upon completion, I will send them a gift card to that email. Since I do not want them to insert this email anywhere in the actual task, but I need to know who has completed it, will I be able to tell which Personal link completed the task? As I will have insight which link corresponds to chick email, I will be able to send the gift cards accordingly.
Thank you.
Marta
Comments
Hi Marta,
I am designing an experiment that will be run on JATOS and I am not sure what kind of worker type to choose. Since my experiment will be long, I want to give the participants the possibility of not doing it all at once. I have thought about two ways of doing this: (1) splitting my study in two smaller studies each with two (different) components of my experiment (2) having 4 components in my task and allowing multiple entries.
Both will work. But for option 2, you would need to make sure that participants who completed (say) components 1,2, and 3 are sent directly to component 4.
For Option (1) I would give my participants Personal Single worker links, but the problem is that I will not be able to link the participants across components if these are split across two experiments. Is this true?
Personal single workers can be used only once. So you would have to create one per participant and hand them out individually. In that case, it would actually be easy to keep track of which two links correspond to the same person. (You could keep that safely stored somewhere outside JATOS, for example. Or use the 'comment' field when you create links to note the unique ID for each link)
In option (2) I would provide the participants with Personal Multiple Worker links, so that they would be able to come back. But, as I gather from the documentation, this type is designed for a longitudinal type of study, the participants would have access to the already completed components. Is there a way to block the previously components completed. Does the "allow reload" option help with this? If I were to uncheck it, would this mean that when they return the coupled component would not be available?
No, that wouldn't help. What you could do instead is use the Batch Session Data, which outlives individual study runs. There you could store, for each ID, which components were completed. And then have a first component that "welcomes" participants, reads the ID, checks it against the information stored in the batch session data, and redirects them to the corresponding component. In the example page, we have an example to randomize conditions between participants. It's a different use case, but actually a little bit similar in the implementation.
We actually wrote a detailed page in the docs (http://www.jatos.org/Cross-sectional-and-longitudinal-studies.html#3-write-longitudinal-studies) about all this.
Also, does JATOS save in the results the Personal link that the participants used to access the task? I am asking this because I will have a pre-study with the info and consent form, and if the participant consents all that they will do is provide me their email and I will then send the personal link there. Upon completion, I will send them a gift card to that email. Since I do not want them to insert this email anywhere in the actual task, but I need to know who has completed it, will I be able to tell which Personal link completed the task? As I will have insight which link corresponds to chick email, I will be able to send the gift cards accordingly.
No, JATOS doesn't store the link used to access the study. What you could do is generate an ID in that component where people enter their email, and ask them to input that ID when they run the task.
Hope this helps
Elisa
Hi Elisa,
Yes, this is great info. With all this taken into consideration I believe it is safer to divide the task in two parts and have personal single worker links.
I would like to ask you a few additional things. I am getting help in making a script which will automatically send the two links on the obtained email from the participants. Does the link contain any information on the ID that the participant will have in their batch? Because I need to have a way of linking the two parts of the task. I understand the idea of also creating an ID for them, but I would like to rely the least possible on depending on participants filling in these key information.
Can a Batch be divided to have different components? This way I would not separate the components in experiments but in batches. I could then release the two batches with different components at the same time and the participant would access them with the same single worker link and would once go to batch A and the second time to batch B. Could this be a solution to my problem?
I apologise if what I am asking is basic, but I have only worked locally in JATOS assembling my components and I really want to understand the dynamic of the batches and workers and plan accordingly. Thank you.
Marta
Hi Marta,
I will try to answer below. But all these things are harder to describe than to actually try. I recommend that you just try it out and ask again any other problems you have in implementing your solution.
Does the link contain any information on the ID that the participant will have in their batch?
Yes. Though not for long, future JATOS releases will hide all this information that is explicit in the URLs. We'll keep this use case in mind while changing this.
Can a Batch be divided to have different components? This way I would not separate the components in experiments but in batches. I could then release the two batches with different components at the same time and the participant would access them with the same single worker link and would once go to batch A and the second time to batch B. Could this be a solution to my problem?
I'm not sure I understand. A batch does not have components, so in JATOS' terms, the question doesn't make sense. Also two batches will have two different links, so that solution would not work. I think that the only way is to store each participant's progress in the batch session data, as I described earlier.
Best
Elisa