How to Interoperate Inquisit Web Edition with Online Survey Packages

For many research projects, it is desirable to use Inquisit's reaction time capabilities in conjunction with online survey packages such as Survey Monkey, Unipark, Qualtrics, etc. This scenario is quite common among Inquisit users, and we've put some features in place to make the transition back and forth between Inquist and other packages as smooth as possible.

Integrating surveys and Inquisit measures into a seamless and coherent user experience for participants is primary accomplished by automatically redirecting participants back and forth between the different programs. Most survey packages allow you to forward participants to another web site after they've completed part or all of the survey. You need only specify the Inquisit launch page as your forwarding url, and your participants will be automatically redirected to the Inquisit portion of the study when the survey is complete.

Similarly, Inquisit allows you to specify a "Finish Page", where it will redirect participants after they've completed the Inquisit part of the experiment. Here you would specify the url to the survey page where you want participants to go next. Having done this, Inquisit will automatically send participants back to the survey once the reaction time task is complete.

Now the question is, how do you correlate the data from the survey with the Inquisit reaction time data? And, if you are sending participants back to the survey web site after the Inquisit part, how does the site know which participant this is? The answer is to create a unique subject id for each participant, and share it between Inquisit and the survey so that both record it in the data file.

The way to do this is to have participants start in the survey, all of which will generate some sort of unique id for participant. When the survey is finished, the survey package will forward them to the Inquisit launch page url, and it will append the participant id (and sometimes some other data) to the url as query parameters. For the example, the forwarding url to the Inquisit page might look like the following:

http://research.millisecond.com/sniffles/myexperiment.web?subjectnumber=134&phase=3

The url contains two parameters named "subjectnumber" and "phase", the values of which are dynamically set by the survey package for each participant (to 134 and 3 in this example). The "subjectnumber" parameter is a unique id, and "phase" is used by the survey package to determine which phase of the survey to run next when the participant returns. We want to make sure that a) Inquisit records this subject number in the data, and b) Inquisit forwards both parameters back to the survey web site when finished so the site knows which subject has arrived and can pick up where it left off.

To use the subjectnumber, just run through the webscript registraion wizard. When asked how to generate subject ids, select the "Query Parameter" option and specify the name of the parameter (in this case, the name is "subjectnumber"). That's it, Inquisit will now extract this subject number from the url and record it in the data file.

When the Inquisit is finished, it will automatically append all of these query parameters to the Finish Page url so that the values are passed back to the survey package. Continuing with the example above, if the finish page is:

http://www.surveysrus.com/coolsurvey/part2.html

Inquisit will append the parameters onto it so the actual forwarding url is

http://www.surveysrus.com/coolsurvey/part2.html?subjectnumber=134&phase=3

Now the survey package can extract these values and pick up where it left off with this participant.

You can specify the finish page using the webscript registration wizard as well. Importantly, you should just specify the base url here without the query parameters! Inquisit will dynamically append the parameters onto the base url for you.