ABSTRACT

The mock website paradigm has been established as a methodological standard for experimental selective exposure research. To date, despite the amount of empirical research utilizing mock website experiments, no openly accessible practical implementations tailored to the needs of communication scholars exist. In this paper, we first review extant implementations of mock website experiments in selective exposure research and outline the methodological shortcomings. We then outline a procedure to conduct mock website experiments that addresses these shortcomings using only freely available software and that does not restrict participants to specific devices nor require additional software to be installed. Additionally, it can be employed and easily adapted without further programming knowledge as all scripts are published open-source on GitHub. We also demonstrate an application of the procedure by outlining a study on selective exposure to search engine content (N = 1,187). Further applications and limitations of the procedure are discussed.

抽象的

模拟网站范例已建立为实验性选择性暴露研究的方法学标准。迄今为止，尽管利用模拟网站实验进行了大量的实证研究，但还没有针对通信学者需求的可公开获取的实用工具。在本文中，我们首先回顾了模拟网站实验在选择性暴露研究中的现有实现，并概述了方法上的不足。然后，我们概述了进行模拟网站实验的过程，该过程仅使用免费提供的软件即可解决这些缺点，并且不将参与者限制在特定设备上，也不需要安装其他软件。此外，由于所有脚本都是在GitHub上开源发布的，因此无需进一步的编程知识即可使用和轻松修改它。N  = 1,187）。讨论了该程序的其他应用和局限性。