Advanced Methods for Conducting Online Behavioral Research

About

Samuel D. Gosling PhD is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He has been using the Internet to collect data since the mid 1990s when he created a questionnaire to collect personality ratings of pets by their owners. Since then he has published numerous articles that make use of data collected on the Internet; these articles focus on such diverse topics as personality change over the life span the links between music preferences and personality geographic variation in psychological traits and perceptions of others based on their Web sites and their online social networking profiles (e.g. Facebook). His 2004 American Psychologist article focused on evaluating the pros and cons of Internet methods.   Dr. Gosling's substantive research has focused on animal personality and on how human personality is manifested in everyday contexts like bedrooms offices clothing Web pages and music preferences. The latter topic was summarized in his book Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You (2008).   Dr. Gosling is a recipient of an American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution.  John A. Johnson PhD is a professor of psychology at the Pennsylvania State University DuBois. He also serves as the consultant for the International Personality Item Pool a Web-based repository for psychological measures in the public domain. He entered the field of computer-assisted psychological research in 1986 when he wrote microcomputer programs for scoring and interpreting the Hogan Personality Inventory. When the World Wide Web emerged in the 1990s he transported concepts from these programs to the Web. He has published research on assessing the validity of data collected on the Internet and on sharing data through Web-based collaboratories.