Methods Archives - Kurt Munz

When Voices Defy Labels: The Hidden Challenge of Gender-Ambiguous Speech

In recent years, digital voice assistants have begun to diversify. In a bid to break from gender stereotypes, Apple introduced a new Siri voice in 2022 that didn’t sound clearly male or female. This move was praised for promoting inclusivity and challenging the norm of female-voiced, subservient AI. But it also raised an important question: how do people react when they hear a voice they can’t easily categorize by gender?

A new study by Shahryar Mohsenin and Kurt P. Munz, published in Psychological Science, reveals that people may react negatively to gender-ambiguous voices—not because of prejudice, but due to a phenomenon the authors call “social disfluency.” Drawing on a series of five preregistered experiments involving over 3,600 participants, the researchers explored how unfamiliar or hard-to-categorize voices influence how we judge the content those voices convey.

How to Add Frequencies as a Variable in SPSS

This post will cover how to add the number of times a certain response has been given for a variable (its frequency or count), and append this information to the data set as a new variable in SPSS. For example, say you have a list of names. Next to each name you’d like to add the number of times the name appears in the list. In SPSS, this information is easy to view with the “frequencies” dialogue, but how do you add it as a variable automatically?

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Doing Math in Qualtrics

Sometimes when creating surveys in Qualtrics you wish to do some kind of math on a respondent’s answer. This post outlines a simple way to do so using javascript.

The procedure involves three main components. First, there are the questions themselves. These are the responses you wish to do some math operations on. Second, there are embedded data variables. You create these variables in the survey flow, and they allow you to save the values you calculate for later use. For example, you could use them in the survey flow (branch logic) or display the values as piped text. Third, there is the javascript. The javascript reads the answers of the questions, performs the math, and saves the embedded data variables.

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How to Counterbalance in Qualtrics without Duplicating Questions

Counterbalancing is an experimental procedure to control for the effect of question order. This post shows you how to do it in Qualtrics without having to create duplicate questions.

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Updated: Rank-Order Carry Forward in Qualtrics with Javascript

This post describes a method to ask future questions using the responses from a rank-order type question in Qualtrics. For example, if you wanted to have a respondent state relative preference between the second and third highest ranks obtained from the rank order.

Normally, to use the responses from a previous question in a subsequent one, the creator of a survey would use the “Carry Forward Items” capability built into Qualtrics. However, you’ll notice that, for some reason, the options are extremely limited as to which you can carry forward. This post describes a way in which you can use javascript to accomplish a similar functionality. It will address questions such as, “how do I carry forward rank-orders in Qualtrics?” or “is there a method to get answers to previous questions using javascript in Qualtrics?”

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