SCILA at the WebSci’21

SCILA team discussed online experiments during the workshop at the WebSci’21

Researchers from the Laboratory for Social and Cognitive Informatics took part in the 13th ACM Web Science Conference. They held a workshop devoted to the methodology of online experiments. The event was prepared by Olessia Koltsova, Yadviga Sinyavskaya, Victoria Vziatysheva, and Maxim Terpilovskii. 
Scholars discussed the specificity of online experiments which differs them from the lab ones and gave practical recommendations of what to consider while working on such research designs. Furthermore, they discussed particular stages of conducting online experiments including the following: recruitment of participants via social media and construction of representative sample; selection of stimulus material demonstrated to the respondents; development of the interface and monitoring system which allows controlling the process of data collections; approaches to data analysis. 
The workshop was largely based on examples from the recent laboratory project which is aimed at studying users’ perception of fake news. The SCILA research team conducted an online experiment testing users’ ability to discern fake news from real ones in three countries. This study involved around 10,000 participants. 
WebSci’21 is an international conference hosted by the University of Southampton. Its main focus is web science — an interdisciplinary field dedicated to understanding the complex impacts of the Web on society, and vice versa. This year, the conference was held online and devoted to globalization, inclusion, and the Web in the context of COVID.