Internet-Based Research Method

Some General Terms

To ease discussion, some general terms need to be introduced as they are unique to research on the Internet. These terms are shown in Table 1.

Development

The use of the Web for data collection primarily required the development of forms in Web pages. Forms are so ubiquitous now that it is hard to realize that forms are not an original part of the Web, which was primarily a novel way of moving between and within documents via links (hypertext). The next development was the ability to embed images in the browser known as Mosaic. However, until forms were developed, there was no means to gain information from the user. With the development of forms, and the simultaneous means to store the information from the forms, it was possible to ask readers of Web pages to submit information, and then these data could be sent to the server and stored. This development occurred in the mid-1990s and it was not long before psychological researchers took advantage of this possibility to present stimuli to participants and collect their responses, thereby conducting experiments over the Internet.

From that point in time, the use of the Internet for research has grown dramatically. In the mid-1990s, only a handful of studies were posted each year; now, hundreds of new studies are posted each year as shown on websites like Psychological Research on the Net. The largest proportion of studies is in the area of social and cognitive psychology, although studies have been conducted in most areas of psychology including emotions, mental health, health psychology, perception, and even biopsychology.

...