Online Research in Psychology and Its Future in China

Chen Guoqiu; Gao Xiaoxue; Yan Xinyuan; Du Meng; Zang Yinyin; Wang Yin

doi:10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20230529

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Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2023, Vol. 46 ›› Issue (5) : 1262-1271. DOI: 10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20230529

Theories & History of Psychology

Online Research in Psychology and Its Future in China

Chen Guoqiu¹, Gao Xiaoxue², Yan Xinyuan³, Du Meng⁴, Zang Yinyin⁵, Wang Yin¹

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Abstract

The rapid and global expansion of the Internet has significantly changed the way psychologists conduct research and revolutionized the field of psychology. Traditionally, researchers invite subjects to the lab and run experiments on specialized equipment. Now, researchers can test subjects online and accumulate data through the internet at any time. The outbreak of COVID-19 further manifests the advantages of web-based research over traditional lab-based approaches and demonstrates great promise. In this article, we discussed the past, present, and future of online research in psychology. We provided a comprehensive overview of the literature and explored how to systematically promote and develop this field in China. We first introduced the definition and scope of online research, considering four broad domains of research (e.g., web-based surveys/experiments, big data methods, real-time interactive games, and mobile experience sampling). The strengths and weaknesses of each research domain were outlined and summarized. Next, we reviewed the history of internet research by highlighting key milestones from computer sciences and psychological sciences in the past 50 years and envision the future from both sides. We summarized the methodological issues when conducting research online and suggested the best practical recommendations collected from the literature. Although online psychological research comes with technical challenges, the opportunities far outweigh the costs. Online research is becoming a fundamental part of psychological research. Every subfield in psychology has now begun to leverage online approach and many traditional lab-based paradigms have been adapted to the online version. We provided abundant empirical evidence supporting its reliability and suggested that the online data quality can be as precise and robust as traditional lab experiments. In addition to its methodological advantages, we particularly elaborated on the conceptual advantages of internet research. It has profound benefits on open science, citizen science, and big team science and can be used to address replication crises, generalization crises, ecological validity problems, and WEIRD problems. In the second part of this paper, we focused on the online research community in China and discussed its future development. We pointed out its undeveloped status in China by surveying the scarcity of online studies published, and online research tools and platforms developed by Chinese researchers. By analyzing different factors that could impede the spread and development of online research in China, we offered a couple of suggestions and solutions. We advocate that Chinese psychologists should warmly embrace online research by actively learning the latest literature and technology and seize the opportunities for better science, education, and clinical use. The benefits of doing so became increasingly apparent, including the improved efficiency and accuracy of data collection, the ability to target massive and diverse Chinese participants (both healthy and clinical populations), the implementation of both data-driven and hypothesis-driven research, the opportunity to address imbalanced teaching and research resource across universities and provinces, and ultimately increase the impact of psychological research on society and common people. To achieve this goal, we proposed a public digital infrastructure framework for online research in China. It will serve as a multifunctional ecosystem for participant recruitment (via shared pool crowdsourcing), online tool development (mobile app, smart wearable device), open science practices (data sharing, code and stimuli database), scientists forum (collaboration and Q&A), digital mental health services and popular science on psychology (videos, articles, wiki). The entire idea has now been implemented in NaoDao website (www.naodao.com), an online empirical research platform with a strong emphasis on sharing, transparency, and usability. Finally, we highlight novel methods, emerging trends, and new research directions for future studies.

Key words

online psychology / internet psychology / online experiment / online public research platform / open science

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Chen Guoqiu, Gao Xiaoxue, Yan Xinyuan, Du Meng, Zang Yinyin, Wang Yin. Online Research in Psychology and Its Future in China[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2023, 46(5): 1262-1271 https://doi.org/10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20230529

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