ABSTRACT Changes in information communication technology across the Asian region have altered our field substantively and methodologically. The rapid growth of digitized communications allows us to find new purchase in examining questions fundamental to our understanding of communication theories, norms, and practices across Asia. While methods such as text mining and user analytics are increasingly popular among computational scholars, here, we focus on online field experiments, an approach to studying communication that has the potential to overcome many existing obstacles to social scientific inquiry but one that has been used relatively rarely in Asia. In this paper, we discuss what online field experiments are and how they differ from traditional experiments as well as online lab and survey experiments. We show how researchers can go about designing and implementing online field experiments, focusing on issues where online field experiments differ from their traditional counterparts – legal and ethical considerations, construct validity, randomization and spillover, and statistical analyses. Finally we discuss how online field experiments can advance our understanding of communication in Asia by helping researchers to gain insight and make causal inferences on attitudes, behaviors, and interactions that were previously unobservable ℘.

中文翻译：

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在线现场实验

摘要 亚洲地区信息通信技术的变化已经从本质上和方法论上改变了我们的领域。数字化传播的快速增长使我们能够在研究对我们理解亚洲传播理论、规范和实践至关重要的问题时找到新的方向。虽然诸如文本挖掘和用户分析之类的方法在计算学者中越来越受欢迎，但在这里，我们专注于在线实地实验，这是一种研究交流的方法，它有可能克服社会科学探究的许多现有障碍，但已相对使用在亚洲很少见。在本文中，我们将讨论什么是在线现场实验，以及它们与传统实验以及在线实验室和调查实验有何不同。我们展示了研究人员如何设计和实施在线现场实验，重点关注在线现场实验与传统实验不同的问题——法律和伦理考虑、结构有效性、随机化和溢出以及统计分析。最后，我们讨论了在线实地实验如何通过帮助研究人员获得洞察力并就以前无法观察到的态度、行为和互动进行因果推断，从而提高我们对亚洲传播的理解 ℘。