Of course (though wheel reinvention can be super helpful educationally), but there are great free public R packages that interface to STAN (I use “rethinking” for my hierarchical Bayesian regression needs but I think Rstan would work, too), so going with someone’s unnamed, private code isn’t necessary imo. How much did the survey cost (was it a lot longer than the included google doc, then? e.g. Did you have screening questions to make sure people read the paragraph?). And model+mcmc specification can have lots of fiddly bits that can easily lead us astray, I’d say
Yeah, the survey was a lot longer. Typically general public surveys will cost over 10 dollars a complete, so getting 1200 cases for a survey like this can cost thousands of dollars.
I agree that model specification can be tricky, which is a reason I felt it well worth it to use the proprietary software I had access to that has been thoroughly vetted and code reviewed and is used frequently to run similar analyses rather than trying to construct my own.
I did not make sure people read the paragraph. I discussed the issue a bit in my discussion section, but one way a web survey might understate the effect is if people would pay closer attention and respond better to a friend delivering the message. OTOH, surveys do have some potentual vulnerability to the hawthorne effect, though that didn’t seem to express itself in the donations question.
Of course (though wheel reinvention can be super helpful educationally), but there are great free public R packages that interface to STAN (I use “rethinking” for my hierarchical Bayesian regression needs but I think Rstan would work, too), so going with someone’s unnamed, private code isn’t necessary imo. How much did the survey cost (was it a lot longer than the included google doc, then? e.g. Did you have screening questions to make sure people read the paragraph?). And model+mcmc specification can have lots of fiddly bits that can easily lead us astray, I’d say
Yeah, the survey was a lot longer. Typically general public surveys will cost over 10 dollars a complete, so getting 1200 cases for a survey like this can cost thousands of dollars.
I agree that model specification can be tricky, which is a reason I felt it well worth it to use the proprietary software I had access to that has been thoroughly vetted and code reviewed and is used frequently to run similar analyses rather than trying to construct my own.
I did not make sure people read the paragraph. I discussed the issue a bit in my discussion section, but one way a web survey might understate the effect is if people would pay closer attention and respond better to a friend delivering the message. OTOH, surveys do have some potentual vulnerability to the hawthorne effect, though that didn’t seem to express itself in the donations question.