Online research: your questions, answered by Jo Evershed of Gorilla

In the last ten years, the possibilities of online research have grown tremendously – advancing far beyond just standard surveys.

At a recent Prolific Presents, Jo Evershed, CEO of Gorilla Experiment Builder, discussed the exciting potential of the latest online research tech. Read on to discover her insights into what’s possible with online research and get answers to common concerns about migrating from lab to laptop.

Why go online?

There are plenty of reasons – but the three people are most drawn to are online research’s speed, scale, and reach.

You can save weeks, or even months, of time and frustration by taking your studies online, creating tasks quickly and collecting data faster than you could’ve ever imagined.

And gone are the days of searching for 50 people to traipse to the lab – you can now find 500 vetted, trusted participants in a lunch break, or 1,000 in a day.

The accessibility of the internet even allows you to reach into people’s homes, recruiting children, the elderly, neurodivergent and clinical populations, and others who can’t or don’t want to show up in person – at scale.

Aren’t there limitations?

Some research is always going to have to take place in the lab. People don’t have MRI machines at home after all! Nevertheless, there are increasingly fewer limitations and more possibilities with online research.

Think we’re simply talking about taking traditional methods online? Think again.

Platforms like Gorilla Experiment Builder make online behavioral studies easy, fast, and accessible to a far wider range of researchers – and enable methodologies that aren’t possible with lab software.

In fact, these methodologies are fundamentally changing the way we research (Exciting stuff, right?)

They include:

• Traditional surveys and reaction-time tasks with validated temporal precision.
• Audio and webcam recording to capture voice, gesture, or facial expressions.
• Eye-tracking through participants’ webcams.
• Mouse-tracking with the mouse.
• Drawing tasks and trail-making, which capture creativity and more nuanced thought processes.
• Games, which can be made without even having to code. Games are exceptionally useful for developmental psychologists who need to work hard to keep children engaged.
• Multiplayer for 2-8 participants, allowing you to study behavior in a social context.  All sorts of cognitive scientists can easily use multiplayer methods.
• Virtual shops, complete with your own products, prices, and adverts. This is a favorite of epidemiologists and health psychologists, who use it for food purchasing research. Consumer psychologists also use virtual shops for all sorts of research.
• Navigation simulation. This captures how shoppers behave in “real world” environments that you can manipulate in experiments.
• Website simulations, which capture how people behave in digital environments that you can manipulate in experiments.

There are so many possibilities with online research platforms, that after replicating their lab protocols online, researchers often discover new possibilities that further inform their research area.

Plus, participants enjoy a break from typical surveys and are often delighted by studies that – for example – move them seamlessly from a survey to reaction-time tasks, then onto a game, and finally a shopping task. And as we know, happy participants are engaged, which will help you capture more accurate and robust data.

While you, the researcher, get psychographics, psychometrics, and simulated purchasing behavior all from one study giving you a far richer data set to analyze.

Won’t it be hard?

In short: no. Plenty of undergraduate students find online research tools easy to use and learn, thanks to their simple, seamless user interfaces.

“Wow, I love Gorilla… I was just messing around trying to see if it could do what we needed for a project, and ended up creating an entire demo version, complete with all counterbalancing ready for the stimuli to be added later. It’s so intuitive and clear.”

– Priya Silverstein, PhD, University of Surrey

What if I bite off more than I can chew?

If you ever feel overwhelmed, you can always turn to the support that’s built into the product. For example, Gorilla offer:

• Support documents, like videos, tutorials, and specialist session webinars
• A support desk with regular office hours, providing dedicated Q&A
• An incredible support team, giving live troubleshooting
• An amazing online community, sharing tips and methodological practices

Will it be powerful enough?

There’s nothing more frustrating than putting time and effort into a project, only for it to fall at the last hurdle.

That’s why platforms like Gorilla offer a wide variety of tools optimized for specific use cases – there really is something for everyone! Excitingly, Gorilla tools also include a scripting pane that gives users the ability to augment their tools with a little bit of JavaScript. This gives researchers the best of closed- and open-source research software. A win for research software engineers.

In the unlikely event that doesn’t apply to you, there’s always the code editor, allowing you to build anything you need. Like that one-off, first-of-its-kind, novel task you’ve been dying to create. All supported with fully scalable infrastructure and all the security and due diligence paperwork to settle the most nervous of universities. And these code tasks can be mixed in with surveys, tasks, and games – so that you only have to write the novel bit yourself.

What will ethics and reviewer 2 say?

Online research isn’t the wild west anymore, and there are plenty of precedents in place to keep things fair and secure.

However, it’s useful to have a shopping list of what you’ll need when searching for a platform.

First up, you’ll want to make sure it’s secure. That means penetration tested, with a Cyber Essentials certification and ISO27001 servers.

Secondly, you’ll want its terms, conditions, and policies to comply with various laws. These include GDPR (if you’re based in the EU) and Voluntary Product Accessibility Testing (VPAT), which demonstrate accessibility to people with different needs.

Finally, you’ll want the timing precision to be validated, to know the data are sound.

Best practice is for your first study to be an online replication of one of your lab studies. This allows you to compare the data quality and satisfy your own internal Reviewer 2!

How do I get good data?

You’ll need to think about two things: participant quality and data quality.

Finding the best-quality participants generally means using an excellent-quality participant-sourcing partner. Prolific has the highest levels of participants passing ACQ checks; those who pass have, on average, 90.7% task comprehension, and even those who fail have 60.3% comprehension.

We also suggest finding ways to keep your participants engaged and attentive. You can find 10 effective tips in this blog post.

When it comes to data quality, online methods give far better results than some might fear. Check out this infographic for top tips on how to optimize data quality when collecting your data remotely.

Can I meet open science requirements?

For many, this is super important, as it ensures the transparency, reproducibility, and accessibility of their scientific research.

If that includes you, rest assured that the answer is yes.

“Open Materials is so powerful. I cloned three tasks and adapted another, which removed half the work I needed to do. It saved me so much time.”

– Dr Vivienne Rogers, Swansea University

No more emailing people who’ve long since left for source code or something from a paper. Forget resurrecting someone else’s code from years ago that just doesn’t work. Researchers can link to their protocol in the methods section of a paper so that a keen reader of their research can launch a replication of a published study in just a few clicks.

So, it’s quick and easy to share your work and build on others’ – helping and harnessing the awesome scientific community we’re part of.

Jo Evershed presented the information in this blog during a recent webinar in the Prolific Presents… series. To learn more about the boundless benefits of online research, book a demo of Gorilla to see for yourself.

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