Help setting up a study with a special design.

[LSydell0628]

Hello,

I am a journalist, most well known for my work reporting on technology and culture for National Public Radio(NPR). As part of my research for a story on cyber bullying I am working with two post-doctoral students. We all met and began our work together as part of a fellowship with the Diverse Intelligence Summer Institute ( https://www.diverseintelligencessummer.com/) 
 We are looking at the effect of using the voice to respond to a provocative story on social media.

We think that Finding Five is the right platform for our research. But we have some questions about capabilities on the platform and whether you might be able to help us use the platform for the study.

The basic idea of the study is to set up a page that looks a lot like Facebook with a story from a user that is designed to provoke anger and controversy. We then want to see what happens if people have to use voice to text software to respond and therefore have to hear themselves speak versus simply writing their response in text. The question is whether hearing yourself speak makes you less inclined to bully?

We also would like to add other possibilities to our control groups. For example we want to make it possible for people to record themselves using voice to text and then to hear it played back to them before they send it. Instead of simply hearing their own voice, we wonder if it’s possible for it to be read back by some kind of computer voice.  We would also like it if they could erase what they heard and re-record. Finally, we would like to enable the people who did voice to text to make any corrections by simply fixing the text itself.

I’m writing to you because I want to see whether or not we will be able to set up a system on Finding Five that would allow this? If Finding Five is not currently set up to do this would it be possible to work with someone there to create this kind of interface? Lastly I’m wondering what the costs of this study would be?

We look forward to hearing from you. 

Kind Regards,

Laura Sydell
Emily Winokur
Judit Mokos

[Ting]

Hi Laura,
Thank you for your inquiry and your interest in FindingFive! We really appreciate it. Here are my answers to your questions, ordered in increasing complexity  :

Cost
As a nonprofit project, FindingFive is free to use for most researchers. One of our fundamental principles is all "grammar features", which determine what types of studies you can create on FindingFive, will always be free to every researcher. We have premium memberships that one can sign up for on this page: https://www.findingfive.com/membership/. Premium membership offers researchers some advantages in scheduling and managing their studies, especially for big labs and prolific researchers.

Facebook-like Study Setup
This depends on how much you'd want it to look like Facebook or other social network websites. If posting a photoshopped screenshot of Facebook is acceptable, you can do that with FindingFive today. We support the use of image stimuli (https://help.findingfive.com/api/stimuli.html#image) and you can easily upload whatever images you'd like to use in your study.
If you are thinking of an elaborate setup, where the website actually operates like a social network (a fake one, of course), then it might require some significant effort. We as a platform may not have the time and resources to develop such a feature. Sorry!

Text-to-speech and Speech-to-text
You mentioned that you'd want participants to hear what they have typed in a computer voice (text-to-speech), and do voice-typing (speech-to-text). These two particular features are not available right now, but they sound like perfect candidates for feature additions to our audio recording response (https://help.findingfive.com/api/responses.html#audio). We'd be happy to work on these features - again, for free, so that all of our researcher community can use it for the future.

Participants re-recording themselves
This is already supported by our current audio response, as detailed on this page (https://help.findingfive.com/api/responses.html#audio).

We are very excited for you to use FindingFive to run your study, and will provide all the support that we can. At the same time, please understand that:
All researchers on FindingFive must be affiliated with an academic or research institution that has an IRB for subject protection purposes. Please make sure that either you, Emily, or Judit can demonstrate such affiliations and obtain IRB-approved consent forms prior to running your study.
Any questions please let us know!

[LSydell0628]

This is great news. I'm conferring with my colleague about timing and further details. We are meeting with our advisor shortly and I will get back to you very soon with more details.  Kind regards, Laura