Allowing participants to exit and come back to an experiment

[ZW]

Hi Jeremy.

I’m planning on running a PCIBEX experiment on our server that the participants would complete in multiple sittings. So I’m trying to figure out how to allow the participants to pause and resume the experiment as needed. By “pause”, I mean the participants need to be able to close the webpage and exit the experiment whenever they want, with their responses logged up to the point where they quit. And by “resume” I mean they could 1) log back into the experiment with a preassigned code or individualized link, 2) go through practice trials again, before 3) picking up where they left off for the testing trials. This seems to be a necessary function that many lengthy experiments would need, but I don’t know where and how to achieve it. Any help would be much appreciated.

Very best,
ZW

[Jeremy]

Hi,

Unfortunately PCIbex does not offer that function out of the box, so you will need to code it yourself if you want to implement it. There are two main directions you can go, considering that you are running the experiment on your own server: A. store the participant’s progress somewhere on the server and assign them a corresponding unique login ID, or B. generate an encrypted token when they leave that contains the progress information, so you don’t have to store anything on the server’s side

In either case, you would need to be able to restore the experiment the way you want it, including the order of the trials, which maybe you will have randomized, depending on your design. In addition, you might want to store the value of some variables, if you set those during runtime and future trials depend on them (eg. global Var elements)

In any case, this is not a trivial task, and I can only give you general pointers at this point

Jeremy

[Author]

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