Millisecond Forums

Hi Sibylle,

as far as I know both Unipark and Inquist (Web Edition) allow redirecting / forwarding to other sites after finishing. So, linking the three parts of your experiment should not be a big problem. In order to match the data from these three parts, you have several options: You'd probably be able to match the data solely using timestamps and IP addresses recorded by Unipark and Inquisit. But to make things easier, I'd simply have participants fill out a unique yet anonymous code (for example based some letters from their mother's first name, their month of birth, starting letter of their place of residence or the like) at the beginning of each part. You could then match the data based on this code. Participants might be a bit aggravated because of having to enter their code three times, but I think they'll forgive you... ;-)

Best,
~Dave

Hi Sibylle,

Great question, and I'm glad you asked it here since I don't think I've posted any public info on this yet, though I've addressed it dozens of times over email and phone. Using Inquisit with survey packages is quite common, and we've put some features in place to make the transition back and forth between packages as smooth as possible.

Most/all survey packages allow you to forward participants to another web site after they've completed part or all of the survey. You need only forward them to your Inquisit launch page to start the Inquisit portion of the study.

Inquisit similarly 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 Unipark page where you want participants to go next.

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, most/all of which will generate some sort of unique subject id. When this part is finished, the survey package will forward them to the Inquisit launch page url, and it will append the subject 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&condition=3

The url contains two parameters named "subjectnumber" and "condition", 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 condition is some other data used by the survey package to track state. 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&condition=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.

I've probably included more technical details here than many care about, but some of this information may be useful when communicating with technical support staff of whatever survey package you are using.

Let me know if you have remaining questions.

-Sean

Thank you for your great (and fast) help!!!

[:D]

Sibylle

Very interesting and helpful information indeed. Thanks, Sean! Adding this to the Inquisit help file as a new topic wouldn't hurt, I guess. It might even save you some long-distance phone calls...;-)

Best,
~Dave

Dear Sean

Dear David

Thank you again for your help with linking Unipark and Inquisit. I managed to link both parts of my survey, however, trying to start the Inquisit Experiment (using Mozilla Firefox as Browser) I get the error message: Inquisit was unable to contact the server to verify this script is licensed.Select OK to run the script anyway. Inquisit will not record the data".

Could you give me a hint, what I do wrong? This would be great. Thank you and have a great day,

Sibylle

Dear Sibylle,

in this case, Sean will be the one who can really help you. As you know, he's the mastermind behind Inquisit while I'm nothing more than a regular and somewhat experienced user of the software. All I can do right now, is tell you what the error message means and give you some hints as to what could be the reasons for the error.

Inquisit Web Edition relies on online license authentication each time a web experiment is run. Once a subject starts the experiment in his browser, the Inquisit web engine tries to contact the Millisecond server and check whether said script is registered with a valid account. If this turns out to be successful, the script will run and collect data. If, however, the communication with the server fails, you will get an error message indicating that the Inquisit web engine could not validate the script and hence will not record data.

There are many reasons why the communication between the client (trying to run the script) and the server may have failed. Here are a few things to check out:
 
- Make sure your script is properly registerd with the Millisecond server (i.e. log in with your account data and check all the settings). You might also try to re-register it in the web interface. If there's something wrong with the acivation of your Inquisit Web account, you'll have to wait for Sean to chime in.

- It might also be that the communication failure is due to some specific client configuration (e.g. a firewall running on the computer blocking the web engine from establishing communication with the Millisecond server). You could post the link for your web experiment here and ask other users to try out and see if they get the same error when they try to run the experiment from their computers.

Hope this helps,
~Dave

Dear Dave

thank you for your email! Re-registering helped with some problems, however, not with all. Some Participants can now open the experiment. Some cannot. This could be a firewall problem. It was a very helpful suggestion from Sean to use the 3.0.3.0 version of Inquisit web!

It is a great idea to post the link here, however, the experiment is in German....

In a few days, I will post my experiences with my German sample here in two or three sentences and a little bit about how I solved to link the Unipark survey software with the Inquisit web experiment. Maybe this is interesting for other users too?

Have a great day and thank you for your help,[*]

Sibylle

Dear Sibylle,

I'm glad to hear that a solution is underway. Please do report on your experiences here - I'd be very interested in this information.

Best wishes,
~Dave

Dear Sibylle,

I'd still be very interested in your experiences and pitfalls you might have encountered. It would be very nice if you could write up a short summary whenever you find the time.

Cheers,
~Dave