Comments on: Need help coming up with stimuli for a study.

Question: Need help coming up with stimuli for a study.

RUPure — Wed, 11 May 2011 00:29:11 -0800

I'm going to be running a study, and I need help coming up with a stimulus for it. More on the criteria inside.

I will be running a study where I will show the participants a screenshot of a movie review page (something like rotten tomatoes or imdb). They will then answer a series of questions about whether or not the reviews/reviewers were believable.

I'm having some trouble figuring out the "movie" that will be reviewed on the screen though. I put movie in quotes because it shouldn't be a real movie. The reason it can't be a real movie is because it must be a movie that people have not seen, and it also can't be a movie that they know couldn't have been reviewed by real people (i.e., not movie critics), so it can't be in the past, present, or future. It should be something middle of the road genre-wise and in terms of the actors, because we don't want the participants to believe or not believe the reviews we show them on the mere basis of the fact that they have feelings about the genre or actors. So, obviously, I'm not looking for a real movie, but maybe a movie poster, actor names, and movie titles.

Any help you can provide would be great! Thanks so much!

By: gallagho

gallagho — Wed, 11 May 2011 01:43:06 -0800

Movie titles do tend to conform to certain tropes, perhaps try a site like this http://www.lanceandeskimo.com/cgi-bin/movie.cgi and choose a title that sounds sort of believable, but has not been used before.

By: londonmark

londonmark — Wed, 11 May 2011 03:40:25 -0800

What about using a novel that hasn't been adapted as your inspiration? You could easily adapt a cover design to a poster. Depending on how well read your subjects are, I don't think you'll have trouble finding a reasonably neutral, probably-not-well-known, book to use.

By: Kid Charlemagne

Kid Charlemagne — Wed, 11 May 2011 05:22:29 -0800

The middle of the road is not a specially privileged place. If a critic tells me that yet another romantic comedy is good, I am probably less inclined to believe them than if they tell me a murder mystery in a science fiction setting is good.

Not knowing what you're comparing, I'd control for this by giving my subjects multiple reviews for the same kind of movies and some sort of plausible back story (test audiences were shown a rough edit of three of the same type of movie and asked to write a short review of it (as if they were a movie critic) afterward. (Also, present the reviews in different orders to different subjects. And have large sample sizes.)

You could take this back story one step further by stating that, in order to use these reviews, the studio asked that you obscure its name, the name of the movies or the actors. That way you don't have to go to great lengths to come up with something believable, just substitute in bland names like Bill Smith and Betty Jones.

By: euphorb

euphorb — Wed, 11 May 2011 05:46:13 -0800

Seinfeld had a bunch of real sounding fake movie titles:

Prognosis Negative ("its long, its boring, there's no plot.")
Ponce De Leon
Checkmate ("Yes of course.... only a game...")
Rochelle Rochelle ("A young woman's strange erotic journey from Milan to Minsk")
Chunnel ("Everybody out of the Chunnel! Everybody out of the Chunnel now!!!!")
Firestorm ( "they had a helicopter land on top of a car")
The Muted Heart ("do you think he'll ever find her again?")
Death Blow ("When someone tries to blow you up, not because of who you are, but for different reasons altogether...")
Cry Cry Again ("He's trying to buy back a loaf of his soul!")
The Other Side Of Darkness ("Its about this woman in a coma." )