http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
Modern approaches to low-cost online survey experiments
How do Americans appraise their own political knowledge--accurately or overconfidently? In this case study, I describe a research project which uses low-cost online survey experiments to explore overconfidence in the realm of political knowledge. My research process began with a question that could not be answered using conventional survey repositories. Extant surveys often ask Americans factual knowledge questions, but do not ask them to appraise how well they thought they did in answering them. Both types of questions are required to study the possibility of a political Dunning-Kruger effect (Kruger & Dunning, 1999). I therefore developed an extensive, custom survey experiment that would be prohibitively expensive to implement using conventional means. I programmed survey experiments using the Qualtrics platform and distributed them using two low-cost survey platforms, Qualtrics Research Panels (formerly qBus) and Amazon Mechanical Turk. Using an embedded survey experiment, I randomly assigned participants to conditions that varied according to the presence or absence of a partisan cue. This treatment was designed to study whether partisanship exacerbates the overconfidence in the realm of political knowledge. After collecting survey responses, I used simple t-test comparisons to examine the effects of the partisan cue on overconfidence. In this case study, I explain how other researchers might easily design and implement low-cost survey instruments to test rarely explored quantitative research questions and hypotheses using complex survey designs.
SAGE research methods: doing research online