Social Psychology Testing Platform Leveraging Facebook and SNA Techniques

In psychology, testing is largely used in order to assess mental constructs, such as cognitive and emotional functioning of individuals. Tests permit researchers to easily reach a large population of subjects. Tests introduce also quantitative aspects to the psychological introspection mechanisms. When conducting sociological researches, it is very important to collect data about subjects´ participation and relationship with his social environment. In many studies, Facebook data has been used as a reliable approximation of the social behavior of subjects. This article presents a Facebook application designed to provide additional social information to the tests implemented on Open Sesame platform, an open source platform which provides researches with an advanced and easy to use experiment builder to support their researches. The application presented computes sociological indexes starting from Facebook data and using SNA techniques. It is intended to be an extensible and easy to expand solution to ease the leveraging of Facebook data to perform sociological testing and collect social data. The SNA indexes are meant to integrate the data coming from classical test execution with the Open Sesame platform. The new indexes will enrich test data with social information about the subjects and will permit to perform causal relation researches or verify correlations among different variables.