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Table of Contents
Selective Exposure
In research on the selection of (online) content, the dependent variable is often that the participant selects one (or more) of several media contents offered for reading/viewing/listening.
The implementation of corresponding designs with SoSci Survey is not quite trivial because the selection and navigation between contents cannot be directly mapped with the linear page sequence of a questionnaire. But also selective exposure studies can be implemented with SoSci Survey. There are two approaches.
Jump within the questionnaire
The questionnaire can display any content by means of text modules (completely designable by HTML code), e.g. result pages of a search engine or the article overview of an online newspaper. The following functions can be combined for selection:
- With JavaScript, clicks on content are stored in internal variables and
SoSciTools.submitPage()automatically submits the current page to display the next one. - There a Filter ensures that either the selected content is displayed or that the questionnaire jumps to another page.
- This behavior can also be achieved with
buttonToPage(), which reduces both programming effort and design options.
A ready-to-use package that provides this functionality for SoSci Survey is provided by Dr. Julian Unkel free of charge (open source): OSEM (Online Selective Exposure Measurement) for SoSci
Recording Using External Tools
Another option is to create the website with the stimuli separately (e.g. using Wordpress) and to record the user's activities using the Matomo (formerly “Piwik”) software. In this case SoSci Survey opens only the external website, takes care of recording the total time and provides the before and after questionnaires.
The implementation is described in an article by Leiner et al., since Matomo-PlugIn Exposure Research Tools for data preparation is available free of charge (Open Source).
The disadvantage of this solution is that Matomo/Piwik asl SOftware for user tracking is meanwhile blocked by many browsers. To get around this, further modifications of the installation are necessary.
