Collecting data?

[CafeAmericano]

Hi, I am doing online research. I am not a graduate student, yet, but I hope I can be accepted soon.

I designed online research, but I am having a hard time collecting data since this is a pilot study. Do you have any suggestions?

I posted on facebook, sent e-mail to everyone arund me, but not so effective.

By the way, if you are interested, you can access to my site from my profile.

[go3187]

Some things psychology students do at the university I attend is to offer a small amount of money to each participant (usually about $3 for 30 min), or a chocolate, or to enter them in a lottery (prizes range from smaller stuff like theater tickets, to iPads). Of course, most of these ideas depend on how "wealthy" the research group is. Students also spam all the university mailing lists about their experiments, which can be pretty effective... or at least gives the satisfaction that it probably annoyed those people who weren't convinced to participate.

Good luck with your research!

PS: May I suggest that you add a link for something like "Return to the main page" or "Go to the next part of the experiment" on the thank you pages? It would make it easier to go from one experiment to the next.

[Eigen]

If you're posting it on Facebook and sending e-mails to people you know, don't you worry about a sample bias? Afterall, you're working with a defined subset of the population, and probably not one that's got a proper breakdown of the overall population of interest.

Edited March 29, 2012 by Eigen

[ANDS!]

If the OP can make some justification that his social circle is somehow representative of some population of interest, might be good to go (I highly doubt this is the case though). Realistically, even the second posters suggestion suffers from survey bias: your experimental units are not independent as it were. Sometimes a convenience sample is all that you can go off of though; it can - at least - offer some direction into what a larger scale, less biased survey might reflect.

[Gibbas]

One thing I've seen done is someone created a Facebook event page about the study and invited everyone they knew and asked other people to invite others. I feel like this reached a rather diverse set of people, and I would still worry about sample bias with this, but doing this would still be better than posting on your wall asking for help.