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- Error: Reaction Times are Measured Incorrectly?
Error: Reaction Times are Measured Incorrectly?
I have been successfully (imho) using Limesurvey for three years and I love it. Thank you for your great work.
However, now, I have encountered an issue with which, please, maybe you could help me:
I used Limesurvey Version 3.15.6+190108 locally on XAMPP (Windows 10, 64-bit) to design a survey.
Limesurvey, of course, measures, reaction time for each page that is answered.
In my survey, I created several pages with text that forward automatically to the next page after 3 seconds. There is no option to interact with these pages.
I was hoping to measure a general latency of the hardware and internet setup of future online respondents to my survey.
Unfortunately, when I activated and tested the survey I realized that the reaction time measures vary considerably for these pages.
I tested three times and the reaction times varied between 3.69 and 4.91 seconds, although, of course, I tested the survey locally with the exact same setup and the pages forwarded each after 3 seconds.
Do you know if this is an error in Limesurvey?
Is there a way to prevent this, i.e. to suppress this variation of reaction time measurement?
Thank you so much,
Daniel
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I find 3.69 - 4.91 actually estonishingly good for your setup (even if you are running things locally, there are so many things that play into this.
I think if you want to run tests with the level of accuracy that you expect, you probably can only do it within a native application (not web based) and after a lot of testing.
I would always take the times in Limesurvey (or any other webbased survey system) with a grain of salt and I would definitely not rely on this if you need accurace of 1 second or less.
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I'm not a LimeSurvey GmbH member. I answer at the LimeSurvey forum in my spare time. No support via private message.
Some helpful links: Manual (EN) | Question Types | Workarounds
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I realize that reaction times are an issue with online experiments. However, I was not expecting the maximum delay to be almost 200% higher than the lowest if the study is run locally with browser, server, OS, etc. all the same (and nothing else running in background). That's a bummer :/
Studies seem to suggest that they are more reliable (cf. URL: peerj.com/articles/1058/ )
Thanks again,
Daniel
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I guess when experiments are time sensitive, they should not be dependend on database connections, etc. You might be able to run them purely in the browser (e.g. via Javascript, Flash, etc) and only at the end transfer the timings etc. This is probably better when treating time sensitive experiments. But even then, with Javascript, at least a couple of years ago there were significant differences between the speek of how browsers rendered javascript code (if I remember right, Chrome was especially quick in doing so), etc.
Of course, with the same machine and browser, etc. this shouldn't impact too much, but I just wouldn't want to rely on it.
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Some helpful links: Manual (EN) | Question Types | Workarounds
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- DenisChenu
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I think i use a
- Hide page during load
- Use learn.jquery.com/using-jquery-core/document-ready/ to show the page and start the counter
- Click next (and hide the page) when counter get 0
For body loading/loaded see
javascript : gitlab.com/SondagesPro/SurveyThemes/skel...s/skelvanilla.js#L85
css : gitlab.com/SondagesPro/SurveyThemes/skel.../skelvanilla.css#L31
html : gitlab.com/SondagesPro/SurveyThemes/skel...yout_global.twig#L25
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Do you suggest that I should not use the timer provided by Limesurvey but jquery?
Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with jquery. I have to write the code in the question's source code, right?
I would appreciate a lot if you could elaborate.
Thank you so much
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- DenisChenu
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Sorry, i didn't know you use LimeSurvey timerultimatte wrote: …
Do you suggest that I should not use the timer provided by Limesurvey but jquery?
…

Maybe you can test importing skelvanilla theme and test with it.
gitlab.com/SondagesPro/SurveyThemes/skelvanilla
dl.sondages.pro/skelvanilla.zip
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I tested it. Unfortunately, I still get a considerable variance in page load times with your theme although your theme seems slightly better: 3.78-4.82s with Vanilla; 4.2-5.2s with Skelvanilla.
Please, do you have another suggestion?
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Thanks a lot
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- DenisChenu
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And here : you can choose "well" for question wrapper.
And you can make your own theme with gitlab.com/SondagesPro/SurveyThemes/less-skelvanilla (but need css/less compentency)
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Do you or someone else maybe have another suggestion for the response time measurement?
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- DenisChenu
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Didn't know …
Assistance on LimeSurvey forum and LimeSurvey core development are on my free time.
I'm not a LimeSurvey GmbH member, professional service on demand (or search sondages pro).
An error happen ? Before make a new topic : remind the Debug mode .
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