Thursday, 22 October 2020

E-Prime Go: The Tutorial

I wrote about E-Prime Go before (here and here), but as this infernal pandemic keeps plaguing us, it's been necessary to get it ready for prime time. Luckily, the team from PST has done an admirable job in ironing out most of its quirks and it's now doing a good job for those of us who can no longer rely on our behavioural labs. How do I go about getting my normal experiment online using E-Prime Go?

Thursday, 15 October 2020

Finally, online experiments with E-Prime Go: Ready to go? PART 2

E-Prime Go is now a few weeks older and PST made great steps in getting it COVID-ready, so to speak. In the latest version, there's a new E-Prime Go website that hosts your experiment (which looks way more trustworthy than a dodgy GoogleDrive link), and allows participants to download and run the experiment. Finally, your participant's data can now also automatically be uploaded to the EPrime Go Website, which makes everything a whole lot smoother. I should spend a few hours making a nice walkthrough, but I haven't got round to it. Somehow, I did get round to answering an email with a couple of friendly questions. I suppose it's a bit like a bystander effect or diffusion of responsibility or something that I will often enough answer individuals with lengthy rants, yet fail to write a comprehensive introduction that can be used by anyone. How's your book coming along, Michiel? 

That said, having answered the email, I figured I might as well post the answers as they seemed a very reasonable bunch of questions that could almost be a FAQ if you take 'frequently' not too literally. The questions were from someone asking them in the context of the usual 'should I use E-Prime, or retrain in some cool new software'. We from the E-Primer recommend E-Prime, of course, but I honestly don't really care (PST doesn't pay me!). It's about the right tools for the right job. 

So, without further ado, these are some questions you might have about E-Prime Go.

Wednesday, 10 June 2020

Finally, online experiments with E-Prime Go: Ready to go?

We're right now in the midst of the Corona pandemic and, obviously, the situation is in many ways terrible. Indeed, us E-Primers are relatively well off, given that we are not exactly at the front lines of hazardous, critical jobs or experience the economic uncertainty of freelance/precarious workers. Still, we are stuck at home as lockdowns continue, and even with the strongest measures gradually being lifted, it is still pretty much impossible to recruit human participants for studies to take place in our behavioural labs.

Online experiments may well provide a reasonable stop-gap solution and Psychology Software Tools, the developers of E-Prime, came up with a timely, free extension to E-Prime that enables us to get data from over the internet: E-Prime Go. So, seriously, a free update allows us to finally run E-Prime online?! How did they manage that? In this post, I will explain by reviewing E-Prime Go from the point of view of a typical user, answering the questions: How does it work, is it any good, what is still missing, and what should you as a user keep in mind if you want to go Online. But just to prime you with my opinion: it works locally, impressively well, though it doesn't do cross-platform, but is rather headache free and gets the job done. All in all a fantastic feat by PST that is timely, critical, and critically timed!