Q-Assessor Demos

The Big Picture

Anyone who signs up and logs into Q-Assessor can create and deploy their own study, free, with no obligation. This is really the ultimate demo — one done not with “play” data but rather with your own.

However, we also provide demonstrations of Q-Assessor’s more important features that you can experiment with before you try your own study.

The Demos

Sample Q-Sort With Standard Interface

This demo lets you run through the experience of a participant responding to the study. It begins with the introductory page that is the first thing that someone starting the study sees. It then proceeds to the sorting process itself:

  • the initial general sort into three main categories
  • the fine rank sort into the various “bins”

The demo then takes the participant to the interview questions. Once these are answered, the demo shows the thank-you page that participants reach once the study is finished.

Please note that the purpose of this demo is to show you the user interface and the process flow — not to illustrate anything about how to write Q statements. Read the statements if you like, but they really don’t have any particular meaning in the context of this demo.

Sample Q-Sort With Drag-and-Drop Interface

This demo shows Q-Assessor’s new drag-and-drop user interface. We’re currently testing it, so feedback about it is very important. It appears to function well with all current browsers — Firefox, Safari, Camino, Chrome, Opera, and Internet Explorer versions 9, 8, 7, and 6 — with a modern computer anyway.

Caveats: we had to use a few workarounds for IE6, given that aging browser’s many problems, and IE versions before v9 don’t show the rounded corners that the other standards-compliant browsers do. Older hardware like old PCs running old versions of Windows even with IE6 may not perform well. We’ve tested on Mac OSX and Windows; we’d appreciate feedback about browsers running on Linux.

What about tablets? Well, it nominally works with iOS tablets — the iPad and the iPhone. We say “nominally” because although the drag-and-drop gestures work fine, the problem is that the finger is a very broad pointing device that obscures any fine target like the grid destinations where, in the second sort, the statements must land. The first sort works fine because the targets are large. But because of the large number of targets for the second sort, the targets must necessarily be small and thus harder to hit. This is an inherent problem with the touch user interface, not just with Q-Assessor. And this problem will be present on Android tablets, not just iPads and iPhones.

Hence, if you try this and either like or don’t like it, please either post comments here (if you’ve logged in) or else email us with this information:

  • Your operating system (which version of Windows, OSX, or Linux)
  • Your browser (name and version)
  • Your computer’s horsepower (RAM most importantly, but also processor type if you know it)

Note that unlike Flash-mediated tools out there, Q-Assessor’s drag-and-drop system does not require installation of any add-ons like Flash. Javascript must be enabled, however.

We are about to undertake another validation study comparing this new drag-and-drop interface to our already-validated online interface and to traditional paper techniques. While it appears that most Q fans assume that a drag-and-drop interface is superior, we think that it is essential to study and verify this.

Sample Q-Sort with Images in Statements

This demo shows how you can place images within the statements for participants to review and sort. During construction of these statements, you upload an image (.png or .jpg), and Q-Assessor creates the various necessary sizes — thumbnails for placement in the statements and large versions that show up in popup windows when the participant hovers her cursor over the thumbnail or taps the thumbnail (on tablet computers or smartphones).

This demo also illustrates how the drag and drop interface works nicely with tablets — certainly the iOS devices (iPad and iPhone).

Sample Data Analysis

This demo lets you explore real data from an early published Q study, Len Barchak’s 1977 dissertation — which was mentored by William Stephenson himself. These data have been posted online here. Thus these data are not “toy” data; they are real, meaningful responses.

What you can do on this page is explore how Q-Assessor lets you graph pairwise factors, rotate them (manually and/or via varimax), and review the generated full report. This demo thus lets you experiment with the analytic tools that Q-Assessor gives you.

If you would like to compare directly the output from Q-Assessor and PQMethod — the command-line desktop application currently used by most Q folk — perform a varimax rotation on the demo data, generate the report, and then compare Q-Assessor’s online report with the output from PQMethod using the same data. You’ll see that apart from formatting differences, the conclusions are identical.

Of course, Q-Assessor’s tools are much more meaningful when you’re using them on your own data exploring your own study questions with your own study design. After seeing how Q-Assessor’s analytic capabilities work here, the next obvious step is to set up and conduct your own study!

Created: September 27, 2010 19:18
Last updated: October 11, 2014 00:53


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