Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences

James Druckman and Jeremy Freese write:

We are pleased to announce that Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS) was renewed for another round of funding by NSF starting last Fall. TESS allows researchers to submit proposals for experiments to be conducted on a nationally-representative, probability-based Internet platform, and successful proposals are fielded at no cost to investigators. More information about how TESS works and how to submit proposals is available at http://www.tessexperiments.org.

Additionally, we are pleased to announce the development of two new proposal mechanisms. TESS’s Short Studies Program (SSP) is accepting proposals for fielding very brief population-based survey experiments on a general population of at least 2000 adults. SSP recruits participants from within the U.S. using the same Internet-based platform as other TESS studies. More information about SSP and proposal requirements is available at http://www.tessexperiments.org/ssp.html.

TESS’s Special Competition for Young Investigators is accepting proposals from June 15th-September 15th. The competition is meant to enable younger scholars to field large-scale studies and is limited to graduate students and individuals who are no more than 3 years post-Ph.D. More information about the Special Competition and proposal requirements is available at http://www.tessexperiments.org/yic.html.

We are being assisted by a new team of over 65 Associate PIs and peer reviewers across the social sciences. More information about our APIs is available at http://www.tessexperiments.org/associatepi.html.

This seems cool to me, both for the obvious reason that it will reduce the intellectual overhead required to run a good social-science experiment, and indirectly because I assume the resulting experiments will be open with shared data.