Those participants are randomly assigned to two groups: (1) act normal, and (2) use Beeminder to track exercise and food intake.
These kind of studies suffer from the Hawthorne effect. It is better to assign the control group to do virtually anything instead of nothing. In this case I’d suggest to have them simply monitor their exercise and food intake without any magical line and/or punishment.
Do you have any thoughts on what questions we should be asking about this product? Somehow the data collection and analysis once we have the timeseries data doesn’t seem so hard… but the protocol and question design seems very difficult to me.
I wonder if there should be a group where they still get Beeminder’s graph, but they don’t pay anything for going off their road. (In order to test whether the pledge system is actually necessary.)
These kind of studies suffer from the Hawthorne effect. It is better to assign the control group to do virtually anything instead of nothing. In this case I’d suggest to have them simply monitor their exercise and food intake without any magical line and/or punishment.
Thank you. I had forgotten about that.
So let’s say the two groups were, as you suggest:
Tracking food & exercise on Beeminder
Tracking food & exercise in a journal
Do you have any thoughts on what questions we should be asking about this product? Somehow the data collection and analysis once we have the timeseries data doesn’t seem so hard… but the protocol and question design seems very difficult to me.
I wonder if there should be a group where they still get Beeminder’s graph, but they don’t pay anything for going off their road. (In order to test whether the pledge system is actually necessary.)
Yes, It should be a task that has a camparable amount of effort behind it.