Portion of participants showing as DATA_RETRIEVED and never FINISHED

sferrigno

I am having an issue where some of the participants never show as FINISHED in jatos (just DATA_RETRIEVED). It happens about 20% of the time. The data files that are listed as DATA_RETRIEVED are missing some of the trials near the end of the experiment, the number of misign trials is variable.

I know that this isn't just people ending the study early because participants are entering the correct confirmation code which is only shown at the very end.

I am ending the study with jatos.endStudyAjax();

I thought that maybe the issue was due to slow internet connections, but I added a 20sec pause after the end of the study (after the Ajax call, but before the conf. code is shown) so that people don't exit early. This didn't seem to have any effect.

I am running this via DigitalOcean on MTurk. Any ideas what might be going on?

kri

May I ask which JATOS version you are using? In older versions of JATOS + OSWeb the behavior you described was possible but this was fixed a couple versions ago.

sferrigno

Hi Kri, Thanks for the response! I'm using JATOS Version 3.5.6

I thought about updating but everything (besides this issue) is working great so I didn't want to cause any new issues by updating.

kri

Version 3.5.6 is fine. It sends the result data in the background and waits until they are all transferred before it finishes the study (so the 20s pause in the end of your experiment shouldn't be necessary).

What confuses me is that your study runs with the state DATA_RETRIEVED have a confirmation code (for MTurk). In JATOS the confirmation code is only shown after the study was finished. Do you generate the confirmation code yourself? Can you please double check that study results with DATA_RETRIEVED have an confirmation code? Or do you talk about single component results?

And I have a couple questions for you:

• Do you use OSWeb or similar frameworks/libraries?
• What is the layout of your study? Does it have more than one component? You mentioned that it has trials: does each trial correspond to an component?
• How do you send your result data? I guess you use one of the jatos.js functions jatos.submitResultData or jatos.appendResultData? But how does the code look like?

Best,

Kristian