COVID-19 has disrupted countless lives and dominated discussions in 2020. The pandemic is also having a major impact on research, particularly field research like the type that we are conducting. Our team had just started to collect data when countries started locking down and international travel became impossible. Our research project studies transnational corruption in international business. More specifically, we focus on how local social norms, beliefs and expectations about others’ behavioural integrity are affected by, and interact with, the international legal architecture aimed at combatting corruption and bribery. To that end we use experimental economics ‘games’ in which participants have to make decisions about how to interact with other ‘players’ which mimic exchanges in international business. We recruit people to participate in those games from all over the globe. It is easy to see that for a project such as ours, the travel disruption was a significant blow.
Let us explain what happens behind the scenes before we get to the stage of data collection. For months, we had countless meetings of our research team (that is six academics in two time zones and five institutions), discussing which questions to include, which games we absolutely needed to have and which ones could be sacrificed in the interest of keeping the experiment short and manageable. In between meetings, several emails were exchanged debating the wording, down to which prepositions were more appropriate. All this attention to detail is necessary to be able to trust our findings and, thus, to use them confidently to make policy recommendations.
Once we agree on a draft, then we have to develop the software, which includes extensive testing for bugs and pilots that allow us to calibrate key variables, like duration. It goes without saying that getting data from the pilots kicks off a whole new round of discussions regarding the research design. When we were able to start collecting data, that was the culmination of a long process resulting in a software fine-tuned to data collection under certain conditions (in our case a behavioral science laboratory).
When the lockdown came, we had to pivot from data collection in the lab to data collection online. This posed a major challenge. Several of the assumptions we had made while designing the software and the research design were no longer valid. The instructions had to be rewritten, which meant we once again had to debate the wording (thankfully not the prepositions this time). Should we include the same games and questions, given online attention spans are poorer, making a shorter duration game a priority? And if we have to cut some out, which ones? Sometimes the answers were relatively quick and easy. Other times, the only way was to build a prototype of the software to test the alternatives.
Even before agreeing on the revised research design, we had to overcome some practical hurdles. It is relatively easy to find participants for online data collection in certain countries where commercial services exist and households have fast, reliable internet connections. Things become more complicated when one wants to collect data in lower-income countries. We had planned to use the participant pools of local partners, but, just like us, they had been affected by the pandemic and were unsure as to how we could proceed. After exploring alternatives and feedback we came up with a plan that solves the problems of recruiting participants and paying them for their participation from a distance in several countries in four continents. It is important to note here that for our project it is paramount that we have comparability between countries, which means that procedures, down to the finer details, have to be as similar as possible in every single country. One should not underestimate the significance of this hurdle.
Paying the participants in our research posed another problem. Payment is critical not only to reward the time spent but also so that we can correctly incentivize participants to give accurate answers. But our initial design had assumed that we could hand over payments in person. How were we to solve this now that the experiments were going online? We closely followed conversations among other researchers trying to figure out solutions to this problem. Some went as far as suggesting that a researchers’ association approach a payment-specialist company to work out a solution. We were facing the same issues as everyone else. In the end, thanks to several meetings with our finance officers and the help of our local partners, without going into too many details, we have taken advantage of innovations such as mobile money transfers that bring banking services to underserved communities, particularly those where a good internet connection is not always a given. On top of that, we devised a protocol that safeguards the anonymity of the respondents and, thus, the integrity of our research design. We are thankful to our local partners who helped us with tailoring solutions to each country and our administrative staff back home who helped guide us through this challenging process.
Another issue one should not underestimate is how the pandemic upset everyone’s schedule and the additional workload it created. When spring arrived, most team members had planned to focus on teaching or on other research projects. All of a sudden, we had to reopen a case that we thought was closed, while transitioning teaching to online and planning for what looked like a bleak future for academia in the coming academic year and, of course, dealing with the personal strains imposed by the lockdown.
To conclude, pivoting a finely tuned process to a new mode of data collection in the middle of a pandemic is a challenging endeavor. Nevertheless, we are confident that we have come up with and managed to transition under these very challenging circumstances. We cannot yet share more details, but once online data collection is complete, we will be happy to share more.
Team:
Dr Theodoros Alysandratos
Dr Cormac Bryce
Professor Thorsten Chmura
Professor Abigail Barr
Professor Elizabeth David-Barrett
Professor Marcus Giamattei
Co Authors :
Abigail Barr is a professor in the School of Economics at Nottingham University. Her research focuses on the socially embedded decision-maker; the roles played by guilt, shame, social identity, and social context in individual decision-making; and the factors and mechanisms that determine individuals’ preferences and values.