Prof. Dr. Tom Buchanan (Westminster University, London, UK) will hold a talk on Psychology of the Online Dating Romance Scam”.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012, 12.00 – 13.30
Sala de Videoconferencia, ESIDE, Deusto University

Abstract: The online dating romance scam is a relatively new and under-reported international crime. It has serious financial and emotional consequences, which may have affected large numbers of people. Little is known about psychological characteristics that may put people at risk of victimization, or the effects of being targeted by scammers. This talk describes a project examining the psychological processes underlying online romance scams, possible risk factors, and psychological consequences for victims. Findings from two online studies will be reported, and implications for crime-prevention and victim protection will be discussed.

The University of Colorado Boulder awarded U.-D. Reips with the first FIRST award to the Psychology department, fostering international exchange. Honoring his award he received a glass sculpture of the CU Boulder Old Main Tower from department chair Lew Harvey upon speaking to a crowd of ca. 150 who had gathered for Reips’ colloquium.

In their article “Why semantic differentials in Web-based research should be made from visual analogue scales and not from 5-point scales” that is to appear in the journal Field Methods next week Funke and Reips show how the response options given to the respondents influences the way they understand what to do with the question. A small number of response options implicitly conveys the message that roughly estimated answers are sufficient, whereas a large number of response options can be understood as an instruction to maximize cognitive efforts and provide an exact answer.
To test this hypothesis, Funke and Reips compared two versions of semantic differentials, the prime method for assessing multiple aspects of one psychological construct on a single (web) page. One version was made up from Visual Analogue Scales, the other one from 5-point scales, see Figure.

Respondents adjusted their ratings with Visual Analogue Scales more often to maximize the precision of answers, which had a beneficial effect on data quality. No side effects like differences in means, higher dropout, more nonresponse, or higher response times were observed.
The current paper continues a series of articles by the authors investigating measurement in online data collection, particularly the use of visual analogue scales. See for example http://iscience.deusto.es/2008/04/01/reips-u-d-funke-f-2008-interval-level-measurement-with-visual-analogue-scales-in-internet-based-research-vas-generator-behavior-research-methods-40-699-704/

The Spanish daily El Correo published an article that refers to collaborative research with Dr. Mangan from the University of New Hampshire. In the paper (available from our site) Dr. Mangan and Dr. Reips show how Web surveys can reach members of rare populations and how beneficial Internet-based research can be particularly in interviewing people on sensitive topics. With their research they reached five times as many participants as were reached in all previous studies combined (from >20 years of research). The researched population were those directly or indirectly suffering from sexsomnia – for explanation see Website sleepsex.org by Dr. Mangan.