Client side paradata

Dr. Dirk Heerwegh of the Catholic University of Leuven has developed a script that collects paradata on the user's computer, provided that Javascript has been enabled is the browser.

The script can be found at: http://perswww.kuleuven.be/~u0034437/public/csp.htm

The script collects the following actions:
-submission of a form/page
-response time per item
-response changes
-download time
-change window focus
 

To collect Client Side Paradata (CSP) you need to select this option in the header of your syntax file. The script will be added to the survey or experiment upon conversion of the syntax file. When fetching the data, each page will contain two additional fields with CSP. When saving the data to SPSS, these fields will be named "record" and "rec2" after applying the SPSS syntax.

On the CSP website you can find a script to analyze your data, or you can recode the variables yourself. One way to do this is to use the "text to columns" function in excel and use £ as a separator. The OSuCre homepage contains some tools to prepare the paradata for analysis.