Abstract
The increasingly widespread use of mobile phone applications (apps) as research tools and cost-effective means of vast data collection raises new methodological challenges. In recent years, it has become a common practice for scientists to design apps that run only on a single operating system, thereby excluding large numbers of users who use a different operating system. However, empirical evidence investigating any selection biases that might result thereof is scarce. Henceforth, we conducted two studies drawing from a large multi-national (Study 1; N = 1,081) and a German-speaking sample (Study 2; N = 2,438). As such Study 1 compared iOS and Android users across an array of key personality traits (i.e., well-being, self-esteem, willingness to take risks, optimism, pessimism, Dark Triad, and the Big Five). Focusing on Big Five personality traits in a broader scope, in addition to smartphone users, Study 2 also examined users of the main computer operating systems (i.e., Mac OS, Windows). In both studies, very few significant differences were found, all of which were of small or even tiny effect size mostly disappearing after sociodemographics had been controlled for. Taken together, minor differences in personality seem to exist, but they are of small to negligible effect size (ranging from OR = 0.919 to 1.344 (Study 1), ηp2 = .005 to .036 (Study 2), respectively) and may reflect differences in sociodemographic composition, rather than operating system of smartphone users.
Highlights
Following the advent and proliferation of smartphones, app-based research has spread across the scientific landscape, ranging from fields as diverse as physics [1], tourism [2,3] and geology [4,5] to medicine [6,7]
Due to the novelty of smartphones in general and science apps in particular, a refined research philosophy as well as best practices to accommodate their use as data collection tools are currently still lacking
Events can be recorded in real time, as they occur
Summary
Following the advent and proliferation of smartphones, app-based research has spread across the scientific landscape, ranging from fields as diverse as physics [1], tourism [2,3] and geology [4,5] to medicine [6,7]. If iOS and Android users were to differ systematically regarding fundamental psychological characteristics, results of smartphone app studies would be inherently biased and per se compromised in their external validity This would be a harsh setback for the burgeoning field of personality research in Psychoinformatics [11,12,13], whose results would become questionable at best. Aside from a small battery of demographic questions, we aimed to employ short, yet effective measures that are well-suited for group-level analysis [67,68] and possess satisfying psychometric properties [67] In line with this rationale, we assessed Big Five personality traits with the Mini-IPIP [50], which contains 20 items and has repeatedly been shown to have acceptable reliability estimates [69,70]. In the absence of established German versions, the scales were translated from the original English using the parallel-blind technique [75]
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