helping with programming esp. randomization

[jarvis24]

You can try opening the file in Microsoft Access and editing it there. Before you do all that work though, I would test what you have so far--things might start getting slow once you have 2000+ items in a single questionnaire!

See also: http://www.empirisoft.com/support/showthread.php?t=663

[rfreyberg]

Thanks for your reply. I've tested it out a little and have no problems running the study. Things get a little slow when I'm copying and pasting in the questionnaire - but the actual running (so far) seems to be okay.

I'm a little nervous about using access since I've never worked with it before. Would it be possible to create several questionnaire files (let's say 4) with the video files equally broken up among them and then participants randomnly get the videos from that questionnaire file. How would I set up the experiment to randomnly choose one of the four questionnaire files?

Thanks for your help!

[jarvis24]

That would be a bit tougher because, although you can randomly order the questionnaire files within the greater experiment file, you can't set up skips in the exp file like you can in the que file.

With regard to Access, it really simple if all you are doing is editing the questionnaire information--it's like editing in Excel. Maybe make a copy of the file and just try it and see if you like it. I would definitely prefer it if I were working with so many items. But, hey, if it's working the way you're doing it, then maybe there is no need.

[rfreyberg]

Another problem - I tried working with Access but the formatting looked strange when I brought the questionnaire file over. So, I've been sticking with splitting the experiment into 4 questionnaire files.

However, I think I may have run into another limit of the program. Do you know if there's a limit for the numbers that can be entered for WGR and BGR?

This happened in one of my previous files when I ran a mini experiment to make sure that everything worked, I got the error message "9subscript out of range". It seemed to work again once I changed the values for WGR and BGR.

Have you seen this before? Do you know what the limit on these files are for this value? Or is this referring to something else?

Thanks!

[jarvis24]

I recall one issue with this a while back. There may be a limit such that the specific BGR and/or WGR values that you choose can not exceed the actual number of groups you have in each case. For example, if you are randomizing 15 blocks, you may have trouble if you use a BGR value of 16 or higher for any of those blocks.

[rfreyberg]

More questions! Surprise, surprise!!

When going to analyze the data, it looks like I've maxed out the excel file and when I open spss, I don't get the variable names - but a series of v0001, v002.

Do I need to get excel 2007 to see all of my variables? How do I get SPSS to show the name of the variable rather than the weird code? I've attached a data file as an example.

Also, I've been noticing some problems at the end of the study. It takes a very long while for the program to say "Please tell the experimenter that you are done". The program has been kind of crashing before that point - is there a way to stop that from happening? Everything else runs so smoothly even with all of the video files that the program is coordinating that it seems so odd to practically give up at the very end. If I do a control-alt-delete before getting that popup message, does the computer still hold onto the data or do you need to click "ok" for it to save the data?

[jarvis24]

for the excel limit issue, see:

http://www.empirisoft.com/support/showthread.php?t=498

and see the section on "CSV vs TXT vs SAV Files" here regarding the variable naming issue:

http://www.empirisoft.com/medialab/help/data.htm

let me know if that helps. regarding the stall at the end--how much time are we talking about?