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What are "Research Events?"
A research event is anything that is programmed to happen during a study. There are five major types of research events. Take special note of the last event on this list because this is the one that will be most used in this tutorial. It is called a "Same-Page Stimulus & Measurement" (SPSM) event.
Treatment Events (Interventions - Stimuli)
A Treatment Event, sometimes called an "intervention" or sometimes in performance research called a "stimulus," is an action taken to manipulate something in an experiment to study its effects on a dependent variable. For example, you might be interested in studying the effects of drinking coffee on reading performance. Treatment events are the pillars of classical experimental designs, but they also can be embedded in surveys and questionnaires to study problems of measurement. In this experiment, the treatment events would be the combinations of the two pictures and the two written descriptions of the person in the pictures. These treatments are sometimes referred to as "Conditions."
Measurement Events
These are actions taken to learn about the attitudes, beliefs, personal attributes, and behavior of the populations under study. In a survey, measurement events are usually questions, but in experiments, they can be anything from questions to blood pressure readings to camera images to responses to stimuli on visual displays. The current experiment involves asking the participant's opinion about the person in a photograph.
Support Events
These are strategically placed actions that make ready, facilitate, guide, or otherwise manage a study. Simple screens that instruct the participant or experimenter are typical support events.
Null Events
A Null Event is a place holder where nothing happens (deliberately, that is). The purpose of inserting null events is to fill the time intervals in which other groups are being presented measurements or treatments. This aligns the events in one group with events in another group, thereby controlling for the effects of history.
Same-Page Stimulus & Measurement Events
This type of event is a special combination of a treatment event and a measurement event. This option is used when a researcher wants to present a measurement event on the same screen as a treatment (stimulus) event like a picture. This will be used in the current tutorial in the experiment called "Effects of Verbal Descriptions On Opinions About Physical Attractiveness."