The COVID-19 pandemic has changed nearly everything. An important change for social scientists is that most, if not all, human subjects research has moved online. Given the massive disruptions to society, researchers have asked: who is available and willing to take online studies these days?
Whenever researchers conduct a longitudinal study, one concern takes precedence over almost all others: retaining participants. This is especially true for many studies conducted in the era of COVID-19, as researchers are interested in understanding how people adapt and cope with rapidly changing circumstances.
In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic initiated an unprecedented shift in the American workforce. In a matter of weeks a significant portion of the labor force shifted to working online, a change likely to remain in place for the foreseeable future. Although many of these workers are continuing to perform their pre-pandemic jobs from home, an ever-expanding number are participants in the gig-economy.
When it comes to online research, few topics loom as large as data quality. With recent well-documented cases of problematic respondents and fraud (Moss & Litman, 2018), data quality is often one of the key considerations when researchers choose a platform for online data collection.
Over the last decade or so, there has been a bit of a boom in the U.S beer industry. In 2010 there were about 1,800 breweries nationwide; today, there are more than 8,300. With that kind of growth comes A LOT of competition. Getting people to buy one beer over another depends not only on having a tasty product, but also on having a brand that sticks in people’s minds.
Shortly after it became clear that the Presidential election would be closer than polls forecast, many people began asking: how did the polls underestimate support for President Trump again?
