Re: [Heartlogic-dev] participant pacing

[William L. Jarrold]

On Wed, 29 Jun 2005, Joshua N Pritikin wrote:

> The goal-pair study will accumulate more questions than I can reasonably
> expect a participant to answer in one sitting.  I have an idea for
> getting more ratings per participant.
>
> I'll ask for 30 minutes worth of ratings and then say, "You're done."

Okay.  But, I would recommend you do more "debriefing" than just
"you're done."  See the wiki page called "Research" or somesuch which
is a child page of HowToIntakeAndBrief.  (I would give you the exact url
but it apprears the site is down).

> After one week, I'll send an email saying, "There are more items to
> rate.  Please visit http://...";  I'll do this every week until I run out
> of items or the participant doesn't respond to the email.
>
> Bill, would this be useful for your study too?  Or is it worse to
> introduce another confound?

Interesting idea.

I am not research wise enough to know whether it will introduce another
confound.  But, my intuition says it should be okay.

What I am more concerned about is pissing off our participants.  Sure, 
I know it takes approximately 0.5 seconds to delete a piece of email I am 
not interested in and I don't mind so much getting unwanted mail (luckily 
the spam filters here at work are really good).  But I think lotsa people
would get really pissed off if they got unsolicited email from a 
study-bot.

This is what I recommend...

Subjects be able to quit at any time.

If they finish or do enough (e.g. 30 minutes) OR if they press the "I'm 
tired and need to quit button." then they will be presented with a
debriefing page.  One of the things the debriefing page will say is,
"We would like to present you will more items.  Is it okay if we email
you once per week, with a little polite reminder to do some more items.
You will be able to unsubscribe from this reminder at any time (the email
will tell you how to do this.)

[button: yes, it's okay to email me from time to time]
[botton: no, it's not okay to email me from time to time]

...if they click neither or no then do not pester them.  If they click
yes, pester them via email reminders and include an unsubscribe url thing 
in those nagging email messages.

...I would like it if you would implement this for any Rumination project.

Bill