Doing research online?

[MelTinTin]

Hi, I'm new here - a friend of mine told me that you guys were great at advice and might be able to help.

I'm a PhD student, working from home now (obviously) and I'm stressing out about my transfer viva in a few months - I've got to show that I've done enough work to stay on my PhD course. Clearly, getting anything done at the moment is hard work, especially with the kids at home. But I developed a study I can conduct online and got ethical approval for it. Now I just need to find people to complete it. It's a long study too, it's longitudinal with participants completing a questionnaire every two weeks.

Have you done online studies before? I've not had to recruit participants online and I'm not really sure how. I have Facebook which I use a lot, a Twitter that I use just for following the news, and that's about the extent of my social media footprint. Any ideas are gratefully received.

Cheeky plug just in case anyone here wants to participate:
It's investigating the effects of social isolation on body image and well-being. unioflincoln.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0VyRjl9Y50P7UEt

Mel I'm usually happy to help people out and I did start filling in your questionnaire- but it's soooo long. There are so many items. After ten minutes of constant filling in, I was faced with a page with 50 items on likert scales and I gave up. I know you want to get the most out of the data, but there might be a tipping point for engagement. Also, there's no indication of how long you have got to go at any point. It needs huge streamlining.

Sorry to raise this with you, but I think the chances of finding highly motivated people (and I am one and happy to talk about body image in lockdown) to do this every two weeks then numerous more times after it ends is a bit low.

I would share this if it was quick and fun, but it isn't quite that at the moment. You can share on Twitter/FB and around the place and see what others think though- and try filling it in yourself. You will quickly see what is tiresome to fill in and perhaps you can think through whether all of it is essential or whether some more qualitative data which is shorter and snappier might work better?

I mean- I like the topic. You don't need to know whether someone used eyeliner or eyepencil separately before and after lockdown. You need more generic measures of make-up use that don't tire out the participant trying to think about their primer use or whatever...

I have half an hour to kill and started to take part but you ask for gender not sex - the two words mean entirely different things. Gender is meaningless in science. If you want to look for differences between men and women you need to ask for sex.

If you change it then I will fill it out.

I filled it in - I know you have to repeat several times in different ways for accuracy but it did get boring. It also lacks nuance - not your fault, but some questions didn't apply and for some of us, mental health issues/depression are separate from body anxiety and were pre-existing conditions before Corona. Good luck with it though

If you just need numbers of responses could you get your department to circulate it to students?

The issue with online surveys is that you never really know who has answered and who hasn't - a bit of a literature review about this - I know survery methodology isn't the most exciting but there has been lots written on online surveys - might make your transfer viva a bit stronger and would be a good balance to an online survey.

And yes, shorter is better, always.

10 minutes at a time is maximum you can hope anyone will give you.