What types of social science research are you expecting to fund with this?
Why should we award this proposal rather than finding those researchers directly?
What service do you use to find participants and ensure they are valid participants?
Automate Social Science and Produce Free, Open, Standardized Data
Project summary
Daily, random-sample survey results will be produced and distributed in a free, open, standardized manner.
What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?
The goal is to demonstrate that social science studies can be done efficiently by embracing automation. I aim to test these principles:
Social science should be built on persistent, consistent measurement.
Data collection and analysis should be transparent processes.
An open web technology stack can automate the above with the added benefit of standardization.
How will this funding be used?
All funds will go toward paying US adults to respond to short surveys. In each survey, respondents will indicate a level of agreement with five statements. They will be paid $0.75.
I seek to raise $2700 to run two projects for 180 days. Each project will collect 10 full observations per day.
2 surveys x 10 respondents per day x $0.75 payment per respondent x 180 days
The final output will be two new projects by independent researchers that look like my AI Support Daily Dashboard.
Over the six months, a total of 1800 survey responses will be collected per project. Each day, results will be compiled, analyzed and published to the web by automated scripts. The scripts will also publish to the web a comma-separated file containing the individual responses. (No personally identifying information will be collected.)
Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?
Dr. Jason Jeffrey Jones (me) will lead the project. I will solicit proposals for surveys from the community of social science researchers. I will choose the two projects that I find the most interesting. (I reserve the right to choose, because I will be putting my labor toward setting up and implementing the projects.) I will favor early career researchers' proposals.
I have successfully authored, reviewed and edited dozens of social science projects. This is one I am extremely excited about.
What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?
It is possible for technical errors to limit or prevent data from being gathered. It is possible I have misjudged the appeal, and researchers will not be interested in submitting proposals. It is possible the online survey respondent providers become (or already are) overrun by bot respondents.
I plan to mitigate all of the above by being a competent, flexible and responsive manager of the project.
What other funding are you or your project getting?
If the full funding goal of $2700 is met by the community, then I will personally add $1350 from my own salary to add a third project.
wasabipesto
3 months ago
Jason Jeffrey Jones
3 months ago
Thanks for asking!
Personally, I am interested in nowcasting the public's level of trust - in institutions and each other. The purpose of the funds I am requesting here is to spur others to propose their own nowcasting projects. I hope to receive a wide variety of proposals, and I will choose those with the most (subjectively) interesting questions.
If you fund this project, you can be sure of transparency and standardization. All of the projects will have the same, simple format: daily, five-item surveys delivered to a random sample of American adults. Every one of the projects will immediately and automatically publish analysis, analysis code and the raw data daily to the open web.
Prolific Academic. I investigated MTurk, Google Surveys, and providers like Qualtrics panels; Prolific currently offers the best quality/price in the space. Others' evaluation is in agreement: Eyal, P., David, R., Andrew, G., Zak, E., & Ekaterina, D. (2021). Data quality of platforms and panels for online behavioral research. Behavior Research Methods , 1 – 20.