Abstract
Recently, online testing has become an increasingly important instrument in developmental research, in particular since the COVID-19 pandemic made in-lab testing impossible. However, online testing comes with two substantial challenges. First, it is unclear how valid results of online studies really are. Second, implementing online studies can be costly and/or require profound coding skills. This article addresses the validity of an online testing approach that is low-cost and easy to implement: The experimenter shares test materials such as videos or presentations via video chat and interactively moderates the test session. To validate this approach, we compared children’s performance on a well-established task, the change-of-location false belief task, in an in-lab and online test setting. In two studies, 3- and 4-year-old received online implementations of the false belief version (Study 1) and the false and true belief version of the task (Study 2). Children’s performance in these online studies was compared to data of matching tasks collected in the context of in-lab studies. Results revealed that the typical developmental pattern of performance in these tasks found in in-lab studies could be replicated with the novel online test procedure. These results suggest that the proposed method, which is both low-cost and easy to implement, provides a valid alternative to classical in-person test settings.
Highlights
Developmental research largely depends on collecting data from children
Developmental researchers have started to establish first online platforms for children, including Lookit (Scott and Schulz, 2017; Scott et al, 2017) and Discoveries Online (Rhodes et al, 2020), that both use an unmoderated set-up, and TheChildLab.com (Sheskin and Keil, 2018) that uses
Validation of Online Testing a moderated set-up
Summary
Developmental research largely depends on collecting data from children. While varying in methods, set-ups and concrete testing sites, so far, most research has been conducted in an interpersonal, face-to-face setting between an experimenter and a child. Existing platforms and paradigms are not always available for everyone, because of high costs (e.g., for the experimental testing software), programming requirements (e.g., JavaScript), mandatory software downloads or data protection regulations of the software that do not align with the policies of the research institution. Against this background, when we had to close our lab in March 2020, we decided to establish our own moderated testing paradigm for children. We want to present this novel set-up and validate it as a suitable, safe and broadly accessible tool for online data collection with children
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