Experiment Factory Surveys

An experiment factory survey is a folder with a complete set of files for deploying a web-based survey, ideal for behavioral experiments or assessments. They use Google Material Design Lite styling, and generally look like this:

How do I create a survey?

Creating a survey is easy, all you need to do is create a tab delimited file of questions, survey.tsv, a small configuration file for the Experiment Factory to understand your survey, config.json, and then copy it into one of the standard surveys folders. For example, you can use the bis11 as a template, replacing the config.json and survey.tsv with your own.

Survey.tsv

The survey.tsv file is a TAB delimited file that must have the following fields:

question_type: can be one of radio, instruction, textfield, textarea, numberic, or checkbox.
question_text: the text to proceed the potential responses. E.g., "How anxious do you feel in airports?"
page_number: The page number to render the question on.
option_text: comma separated list of option text (what the survey taker sees) E.g., a little anxious,somewhat anxious, very anxious
option_values: the values assigned to each option above. E.g., 1,2,3. The length of option_text and option_values must be equal.

It helps to look at an example, and see what it renders to.

config.json

The easiest way to generate a new config.json is to copy an old folder, use it as a template, and update the fields. Generally, it looks like this:

  [
      {
          "name": "BIS-11: Barratt Impulsiveness Scale Survey",
          "template":"survey",
          "run": [
                   "https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto:regular,bold,italic,thin,light,bolditalic,black,medium&amp;lang=en",
                   "https://fonts.googleapis.com/icon?family=Material+Icons",
                   "https://code.getmdl.io/1.1.1/material.blue-red.min.css",
                   "style.css",
                   "smoothness/jquery-ui-1.10.4.custom.min.css",
                   "https://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.2.4.min.js",
                   "https://code.getmdl.io/1.1.1/material.min.js",
                   "jquery-ui-1.10.4.custom.min.js",
                   "jquery.wizard.js",
                   "https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery.form/3.50/jquery.form.min.js",
                   "https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery-validate/1.12.0/jquery.validate.min.js"
                 ],
          "exp_id": "bis11_survey",
          "cognitive_atlas_task_id": "trm_55a6a8e81b7f4",
          "contributors": [
                           "Zeynep Enkavi",
                           "Ian Eisenberg",
                           "Patrick Bissett",
                           "Vanessa Sochat",
                           "Russell Poldrack"
                          ], 
          "time":999,
          "experiment_variables": "",
          "reference": "http://www.impulsivity.org/measurement/bis11",
          "notes": "",
          "publish":"True",
          "deployment_variables":{"material_design":
                                 {"fullscreen": true}
                         }

     }
  ]

For a simple survey, you can basically leave everything as is but update the name, exp_id and cognitive_atlas_task_id (we recommend you add your paradigm to the Cognitive Atlas to add supporting information and meta-data and use the unique id to link to it. Remember that the folder name (corresponding to the exp_id) must be all lowercase, with no special characters, and use "_" (underscores) instead of spaces.

Complete details are available

Validation and testing

You can use the Experiment Factory command line tools to test and preview your survey, and validate your config.json. Details are available.

supplementary files

If you have additional images, audio files, or media, just put them somewhere in your experiment folder, and link to them with relative paths in any relevant files.

Issues or Questions?

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