Overview for Instructor:
        FactorWiz (FW) is a good way for students to work on factorial designs and interactions.  In the example below, we assess the attractiveness of someone who is tall, dark, and handsome.  Is there something special about that specific combination?  Is there one or two of these factors that are really carrying all the weight?  We're going to cross these three factors (Height, Skin Tone, and Attractiveness) and get a better idea of the relationship between them.
        Once we make the simple questionnaire with verbal stimuli, I'll briefly present how to modify the web page to accommodate pictures.

Objectives:

• Familiarize with FactorWiz
• Think about crossed designs and identify interactions.

• Finished survey (verbal stimuli)
• Finished survey (visual stimuli)
• Modifiable handout for students (Includes URLs rather than active hyperlinks)
• Ideas for course use and other projects

        FW allows you to quickly put together factorial stimuli.  A JavaScript program, all you need to run the program is a copy of the web page.  It has a simple user-friendly interface and, though it's not necessary, if you know a little HTML you can spruce up the page.
        We're going to use it to assess the influence of 3 factors in judgments of physical attractiveness.  I've always heard that women like tall, dark, and handsome guys.  I say, let's vary these 3 factors and see if there's something special about that particular combination of traits, or do one or two of the factors account for the effects.
         We want to set up a short questionnaire in which respondents see various combinations of the levels of these 3 factors (see the list below) and rate each combination on how attractive you would consider the person to be (e.g., "How attractive would a person be if they were Short, Dark-skinned, and Handsome?")  This will allow us to tease apart what combination of these factors leads to the highest ratings.
        NOTE:  For clarity, factor names will appear in italics throughout the exercise

Getting Started:

1) Using your web browser, go to the FactorWiz web site.  If you want, you can download the web page to your hard drive so you don't have to be online to work on it.

2) First, we need to give our experiment a name.  For the Experiment Name, we need to give it something descriptive, so let's call it "Physical Attractiveness".  The Exp Short Name will define the study's data in the data file and needs to be an abbreviated name.  For the the Exp Short Name, enter "PhysAtt".
        NOTE:  You may want to give it your own unique name for this exercise, so as not to confuse your survey with anyone else completing the exercise.

Setting up a 2-Factor/ 2 x 2 design (Just an example):

3) FactorWiz's use of 1 row and 1 column factor is intuitively setup for a 2-factor design.  For example, if we wanted to set up a factorial design with just Height and Skin Tone, all we need to do is enter the information for these two variables.  For Height, "Height" would be the Row Factor Name, the No. levels of Row would be "2", Row 1= would be "Short", and Row 2= would be "Tall".  For Skin Tone, "Skin Tone" would be the Column Factor Name, the No. levels of Col would be "2", Col 1= would be "Fair-skinned", and Col 2= would be "Dark-skinned".  It should look like this:
 
 

FactorWiz will produce a list of stimuli that represent a complete crossing of these factors.  We need to specify what conjunction will join the stimuli.  In the Separator between Factors textbox (at the bottom on the user interface), type " and " (making sure to include the spaces).

 

We haven't finished the web page, so you really can't preview it.  But, if you could, the questionnaire stimuli would look like this:      This just gives you an idea of what it would look like, but there are a couple of things to make note of: 1)  We haven't included any instructions yet, so it still just says "(put your instructions here)".  This will include the actual rating scale respondents would use to complete the questionnaire. 2)  FactorWiz automatically adds some demographic questions to the end of the survey.  If we wanted to remove them, we could just go into the HTML and delete the necessary text. 3)  FactorWiz also automatically includes some warm-up questions for the respondent.  For this example, I have deleted those warm-up questions.  We'll take a look at them later.