The goals and relationship between these two parties are best explained through a real use case with accompanying screenshots: UI Design and ImplementationĪVA is designed for two types of users: researchers and participants. The following sections will discuss key user interface and system architectural design decisions behind AVA. Using AVA, researchers are able to enroll participants and send scheduled surveys and personalized reminders, using either email or SMS. Or they might complete the survey, then receive a redundant email asking them to complete the survey - and disregard it if they have already done so:ĪVA represents an attempt at building a solution that allows researchers to address both of these factors. Under this format, participants are blasted with standard email templates - they might put aside the email for now, and forget about it. While current web-based research tools are designed with mobile-users in mind, none of them are able to send personalized reminders to participants, and all of them are limited to sending surveys through email. While psychological researchers have begun to design surveys in accordance with the aforementioned factors in mind - particularly in using modern mobile responsive survey tools (e.g., Qualtrics, Typeform), there remain two factors that researchers are rarely able to effectively address: contact delivery modes and reminders. Low response rates are a critical, yet unsolved problem in psychological research. In a systematic review of survey factors affecting web survey responses, Fan and Yan (2010) attribute low survey response rates to the following key factors: With convenience, however, came overuse and desensitization: as early as 2001, researchers have observed a significant decreasing trend in email survey response rates (Sheehan, 2001). Since the creation of the email by Ray Tomlinson in 1972, email has become an indispensable medium of communication: it made mass communication simple, cheap, and scalable. UI Development server will be listening on localhost:3000 - navigate there on your browser. In order to run AVA, you must run both ava-ui and ava-api concurrently. This system attempts to increase response rates in two ways: first, it allows participants to receive survey links and accompanying reminders via SMS - a medium less cluttered than email inboxes second, the system allows researchers to send personalized reminders (based on whether a participant as completed a survey) without compromising user identity, thus providing a secure channel to prompt users. Automated Virtual Assessment (AVA) is a web-based research suite that allows researchers to enroll participants and send scheduled messages (via both email and SMS) to these participants. Surveys are typically sent en masse via email or hardcopy, and their accompanying reminders fail to distinguish between participants who have completed the survey and those who have not.

Data collection in psychological research suffers from a critical problem of low response rates.

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