Data collection

Informed consent and debriefing

• Getting consent — participants must understand the study's purpose, risks, and their right to withdraw.
• Prerequisites of consent — capacity and voluntariness; special care for vulnerable populations (children, clinical groups).
• Debriefing — after participation, explain the true purpose, especially if deception was used, and offer to withdraw data.

Consent is both an ethical duty and a quality control.

Designing the "research experience"

• In-lab participants — control the environment, build rapport, monitor attention.
• Online participants — scalable and convenient (see the WEIRD caveat), but noisier.
• When to collect data online? — online is fine for many behavioral tasks (e.g., the Stroop effect); use in-lab when environment control is essential.

Ensuring high-quality data

• Conduct effective pilot studies — a small pilot reveals bugs and infeasible procedures before you commit resources.
• Measure participant compliance — attention checks, response-time filters, and instruction-following checks catch careless data.
• Keep consistent data-collection records — log who ran what, when, and how, so the dataset is interpretable later (see Project management).

Key terms

• Informed consent — voluntary, informed agreement to participate.
• Pilot study — a small test run before the full study.
• Compliance — the degree to which participants followed procedures.

Further reading

• Previous: Preregistration · Next: Project management · Hub: Experimentology
• Ethics basis: Ethics
• Plan the sample: Sampling
• Data Collection in Psychology — the survey, observational, and archival methods this workflow draws on.
• Ethical Principles of Psychologists — the consent code.
• Stroop Effect — a task often run online.
• N-back Task — trials need compliance monitoring.