Using Google Spreadsheets for psychometrics

We decided (for some reason that this post is not about) that it would be useful to add some basic psychometric data collection to our experimental economics experiment thing. In other words, when undergrads come into our lab to play simple game theory games with each other, we first want them to fill out a list of questions from which we will deduce how extroverted, neurotic, agreeable, &c they are.

But this is not the main thing we are researching, and we don't want it to take too much time, of our subjects or of us.

Which is where Google Docs comes in. There is a feature in the Spreadsheet part of Google Docs where you can create an online form linked to a spreadsheet. Looks like so:



The responses feed into a spreadsheet automatically, where you can then score them using some simple spreadsheet equations. We just tell everyone in the room to fill this thing out, and the moment they hit "Submit", we have their Big 5 personality scores in a spreadsheet.

To be sure, I could have just programmed this myself as a little web application. The same may be true for you, dear reader. But this is much simpler than that. It requires about the same skill level as using a spreadsheet, or a statistics package, which means that there is no messing around with servers and interpreters and programming languages and other bits and pieces that turn programming these sorts of things into a specialist's job even if the task is fundamentally pretty simple.