2. Kinetic Research FAQs - openstax/kinetic-learner-characteristics-lib GitHub Wiki

What can Kinetic do for me (or my lab) that I can’t do with my existing research workflows?

In addition to offering a new way to recruit diverse pools of participants, Kinetic has several other advantages: It is affiliated with Rice University and OpenStax, both trusted organizations, and students are likely to be familiar with one or both. With its initial rollout in Fall 2022, Kinetic will provide a way to analyze fully identified data securely, while returning only aggregated results back to the researchers, via the use of privacy-preserving data enclaves. Kinetic is building a library of measures of learner characteristics (e.g., Demographics, personality, self-efficacy) for researchers to use in their research (e.g., as a focal variable, as a control variable, as a way to further describe the research sample). Researchers will be able to run posthoc data mining studies as well as experimental research on Kinetic.

What tools do I need to use Kinetic?

Many researchers in higher ed institutions already have an institutional Qualtrics account that you can continue to use on Kinetic. If you do not have an institutional Qualtrics account, we will make a guest account for you. You will be able to create a Kinetic researcher account with us for publishing your studies. Besides Qualtrics, we welcome whatever open-source tools you use for your analysis. We currently have support for R and Python for data analysis. Additionally, we recommend using GitHub to facilitate version control and reproducibility. What kinds of studies can be posted on Kinetic? Right now, all studies must be designed in Qualtrics. These can be surveys, assessments, A/B/N tests, RCTs, multi-session studies, etc. As long as you can accomplish it on Qualtrics, you can add it to Kinetic.

How do I add a study to Kinetic?

In addition to your normal process for designing your Qualtrics studies, we will provide you with a template and instructions on how to make your Qualtrics study compatible with the Kinetic platform. We will share with you custom embedded fields and an authentication block to your Qualtrics studies such that Kinetic and Qualtrics can effectively “talk” to each other. Then, from within Kinetic, you will provide your study details, as well as data from the custom Qualtrics fields. At that point, you can publish the study, and Kinetic will automatically generate a link for participants to click from within Kinetic.
Check out the Kinetic Ideas Template for a detailed walkthrough of all the elements that you will need prior to publishing your task on Kinetic.

How can I access and analyze my Kinetic study data?

Although your data will be available from within Qualtrics as they would be in any other Qualtrics study, at this time, we request that you or your students only access the data via the Qualtrics API using R/Python. We have created documentation on how to analyze your data using the API and the relevant tools. We will be happy to assist you and your lab members with setting up these scripts. Over time, we will be implementing data enclaves that will allow researchers to send in their analysis scripts in “containers” that will connect with the Qualtrics database to analyze fully identified data without direct access to it. These enclaves will also create opportunities to merge learner behavior data on OpenStax with all measures available within Kinetic.

What other participant data can I use from Kinetic?

Currently, any of the measures of learner characteristics in our Kinetic “library” will be available to you for use in your research (e.g., as a focal variable, as a control variable, and as a way to further describe the research sample). These measures include demographic traits, as well as popular psychological constructs such as the Big Five personality traits, RIASEC vocational interests, and grit. A full list can be found here. Note that not all participants in your study might have completed all the learner characteristics measures you want to add to your analysis (with the exception of demographic data, which is already a required survey). Therefore, your sample size might decrease if these data are required for your analyses.
In the future, we will develop a process where you may request to use data from other researchers’ investigations that are collected on Kinetic and beyond the scope of Kinetic learner characteristics measures. Stay tuned!

How do I merge other studies’ data with my own analyses?

All participants in Kinetic are assigned a unique, anonymized research ID (an alphanumeric string) that will be consistent across all studies they complete. You will use this variable (research_id) as a “key” to connect multiple data tables. We are currently building out the documentation to guide your analyses of data collected on Kinetic. If you need help combining studies for analyses, please let us know and we will provide 1-1 guidance.