Internet data collection: text versus video stimuli

As technology improves, researchers are able to use the Internet/World Wide Web (WWW) as a tool for data-collection. Technology allows researchers to integrate and utilize the Internet/WWW as a means of administering surveys, accessing databases, and communicating with individuals world-wide. As the Internet/WWW becomes an ever increasingly viable tool for research, stimulus presentation medium is an important factor in obtaining reliable data, efficiently. Currently there is no published research that examines this aspect of data-collection using the Internet/WWW. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between Internet-based stimulus presentation media (text and video). This relationship was studied using an existing data set (A'^= 88) from an online survey (a vignette and 32 questions) that utilized both text and video. A new 21 question survey was created using factor analysis (FA) with reliability alpha. Seven factors were derived from the FA with alphas .87, .73, .71, .68, .52, .58, and .57, consecutively. MANCOVA was used to compare the two stimulus media with the seven factors as dependent variables, medium as the independent variable, and gender and years in practice as the covariates. Results indicate that for the population surveyed, a significant difference existed for a video-based stimulus when judging for emotional impact on therapist. The remaining six factors had no significant difference between video-based or text-based stimulus presentation. The results are discussed in terms of implications for researchers conducting data-collection via the Internet/WWW, and limitations of this study.