From Modems to Mobile Apps

Abstract

Web-based research in psychology became possible with the development of the world wide web in the early 1990s. While at first, only a few people began using web browsers, now more than half of humanity uses a browser every day, providing them with easy access to participate in science. Traditional laboratory-based and field methods were transformed, adapted, studied, and scaled to apply to the online environment properly. Different methods and new possibilities for research emerged, quantitatively and qualitatively, leading for example, directly to Open Access and Open Science. As with other methods in psychology, web-based research methodology has evolved since and has increased and diversified with layers upon layers of new major developments in Internet technology and life (e.g., Google search; “Web 2.0”; social media; smartphones; automated agents; intensive and Big Data; Open Science). The articles in this special issue are a selection of state-of-the-art pieces on and of web-based research in psychology. In the first article, Reips (2021) reviews different types of web-based research, including research that could not be done without the web. He highlights how some specific research areas, for example, on the rare disorder sexsomnia, have profited enormously from the advantages of the web, in this case the combination of reach and anonymity. Reips describes and discusses methods and techniques in web-based research and summarizes the literature that has used these. He moves on to pitfalls and best practices in web-based research, for example, the disastrous fall of large portions of psychology for dubious recruitment platforms, the phenomenon of “embedded scientists” with dominant social media companies, ever-increasing technological complexity, and the helpful role web-based research can play in Open Science. Reips describes how these research practices have changed over time in a technologically and culturally dynamically changing web environment, with milestones such as the appearance and growth of search engines, social media, and mobile smartphones. Confirming an early observation (Buchanan & Reips, 2001), he throws a light on the interaction of psychology (e.g., personality) and technology. Thus, beyond Rosenthal and Rosnow’s (1975) analysis of volunteerism of participants in psychological research, more is to be considered in web-based research that leads deep into the complexity of technology preferences, access, customization (even on a physiological level), and into an intertwined web of technology and active experience in daily life. In their Original Article, Altmann and Kapoor (2021) focus on factors that might influence how people complete unsupervised personality questionnaires online. The impact this might have on data quality was a major focus of interest in the early days of web-based behavioral science. This article shows that there are still things to be learned. For example, levels of extraversion were lower for participants who chose to complete a personality questionnaire in the early afternoon, as opposed to the morning. However, the finding that data quality was not much affected by the time of day and type of device used to participate gives confidence in using online personality tests. As well as research methodology, some of the articles address research ethics. Ethical issues are as pertinent to web-based methods as they are to all research. However, there are special characteristics of online research environments that raise ethical concerns. In their Original Article, Hilbig and Thielmann (2021) focus on one particularly troubling issue: deception. They point out ways in which deception can be even more problematic in web-based research than in offline work (e.g., due to drop-out before debriefing). They argue that this presents significant ethical problems and provide data showing that deception in online studies is relatively common. Their primary recommendation is that deception should not be used in web-based research, but they also provide suggestions for ways to implement deception that are more compliant with our discipline’s codes of research ethics. While some of their conclusions and recommendations may be controversial, this paper shines a light on a genuinely important issue.