Using the Internet for psychological research: personality testing on the World Wide Web

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Internet Research
• Psychometrics

Background:

• The internet is a growing medium for psychological research.
• Assessing the validity of online research methods is crucial.
• Self-monitoring is a key personality trait studied in psychology.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the validity of internet-mediated psychological research.
• To compare the psychometric properties of an online self-monitoring questionnaire with its traditional paper-and-pencil version.
• To determine if web-based personality assessment is a viable research method.

Main Methods:

• An electronic version of the revised self-monitoring questionnaire was deployed online.
• 963 responses were collected via the internet.
• Data were compared to 224 responses from a paper-and-pencil version using confirmatory factor analyses.

Main Results:

• The internet-mediated questionnaire demonstrated comparable psychometric properties to the paper-and-pencil version.
• Confirmatory factor analyses indicated favorable model fit indices for the online version.
• The online measure effectively assessed self-monitoring, similar to traditional methods.

Conclusions:

• Web-based personality assessment is a feasible and valid research approach.
• Internet-mediated research instruments can yield reliable psychometric data.
• Stringent validation of online psychological tests is essential for ensuring data integrity.