The pollster pages

After participants encountered the fourth vignette, the next day they met a pollster in Novaland who asked them several questions on their overall perception of and attitudes towards Novaland. This situation was embedded to estimate the cumulative treatment effects across all four vignettes.

In total, the pollster asked participants three questions: one about how much they trust the government of Novaland, one about their welfare spending preferences, and one about their perception of corruption in Novaland. The question text was stored in the pollster_questionsX_text objects that are defined at the beginning of the main app’s init file (X is a placeholder for the question number). These texts were then inserted into the player models of these questions: pollster_question_gov_trust, pollster_question_taxes_welfare, and pollster_question_perc_corruption. The questions were displayed to participants in a random order, which was achieved by shuffling the list of questions in the creating_session function. The shuffled order is stored in the pollster_order variable in the Participant object.

The pollster questions were implemented into three pages, (Pollster1, Pollster2, and Pollster3), which are displayed in the seventh round of the main app, as defined in the is_displayed function. The randomized order of the questions in the pollster_order list object is used to determine which question is displayed on which page. For each participant, the first page displays the first question in this list object, the second page displays the second question, and the third page displays the third question. This is done by using the get_form_fields method in each page class, which returns the question name based on the participant’s pollster_order.

After participants answered all three pollster questions, they were redirected to the SaturdayEndOfDay page. Similar to the smokescreen and vignette end pages, this page was used to immerse participants into the virtual country and to increase their feeling of self-efficacy. They were also informed that the parliamentary elections in Novaland were coming up on the next day. The SaturdayEndOfDay page ist the last page of the main app. After participants submitted the page, they were redirected to the election_intro page, which is the first page of the election app.