A Comparison of Web-based and Face-to-Face Functional Measurement Experiments

Information Integration Theory (IIT) is concerned with how people combine
information into an overall judgment. A method is hereby presented to
perform Functional Measurement (FM) experiments, the methodological
counterpart of IIT, on the Web. In a comparison of Web-based FM
experiments, face-to-face experiments, and computer-based experiments in
the lab it is found that the computer-based method is less sensitive to
experimental manipulations. However, different integration rules can be
distinguished. The inability to monitor motivation in the unproctored setting
can partly explain this effect. Consequently it is argued that Web-based
experiments enable the researcher to test larger groups which enable more
in-depth analysis of individual differences using single subjects analyses and
clustering methods.