ABSTRACT As news is increasingly distributed online, studies of how people behave on news websites have become important tools in understanding news exposure. Numerous studies have created websites as stimuli, asked experimental subjects to browse the website, then inferred that their behavior in the experimental context resembles their behavior in a natural setting. The external validity of these studies, or the degree to which online behavior in an experiment can generalize outside of the experiment, remains unclear. This study explores the external validity of two such online experiments by comparing the results to field tests. Across two different experiments on a major Canadian and a major U.S. news website redesign, we find that results from the online experiment offered data that were directionally the same as the field tests. Our results suggest that online experiments can offer a generally reliable picture of actual online behavior.

中文翻译：

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评估使用新闻网站作为实验性刺激的外部有效性

摘要随着新闻在网络上的传播越来越广泛，人们在新闻网站上的行为研究已成为了解新闻曝光的重要工具。许多研究已经创建了网站作为刺激，要求实验对象浏览该网站，然后推断他们在实验环境中的行为类似于他们在自然环境中的行为。这些研究的外部有效性或实验中的在线行为在实验之外可以推广到何种程度尚不清楚。本研究通过将结果与现场测试进行比较，探索了两个此类在线实验的外部有效性。在加拿大的主要新闻网站和美国主要的新闻网站重新设计的两个不同实验中，我们发现在线实验的结果提供的数据与现场测试在方向上相同。