Plausibility check on WEXTOR study data

plausicheck() performs basic plausibility checks on a study dataset to identify potentially invalid or suspicious participation. The function can check whether participants visited a minimum number of pages, whether the recorded session length appears plausible, and whether IP addresses indicate duplicate participation.

Usage

plausicheck(
  dataframe,
  min_pages = 6,
  check_sess_length = TRUE,
  check_ip = TRUE
)

Arguments

dataframe

A data frame containing the study data (needs to contain variables page_trail for the trail of webpages in the study & session_length for the overall time each participant spent on the study (if session length is to be checked) and ip for participants' IP addresses (if IP is to be checked)).

min_pages

Numeric. The minimum number of pages a participant must have visited in the study for their participation to be considered plausible. Defaults to 6.

check_sess_length

Logical. Should the session length plausibility check be performed? Defaults to TRUE.

check_ip

Logical. Should the IP address plausibility check be performed? Defaults to TRUE.

Value

A data frame with additional plausibility check variables. The final variable check_plausibility indicates whether all selected checks were passed ("all ok") or whether the case should be excluded ("exclude"). Keep in mind that researchers are advised to make sure that the "exclude"-cases were correctly identified and are indeed of poorer data quality to avoi unnecessary data loss.

Details

If WEXTOR prefixes are detected in the variable names, they are removed before the plausibility checks are applied.

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
plausicheck(my_data)

plausicheck(
  dataframe = my_data,
  min_pages = 8,
  sess_length_check = TRUE,
  ip_check = FALSE
)
} # }

data <- read_WEXTOR(path_to_file("BiFiX_data_raw.csv"))
# The example data does not contain real IPs (data protection), so we will use simulate ones
data$ip <- sample(1:1000, nrow(data), replace = TRUE)

plausi_data <- plausicheck(data) # keeps all defaults i.e. runs all available checks