Population analysis is crucial for ensuring that empirical software engineering (ESE) research is representative and its findings are valid. Yet, there is a persistent gap between sampling processes and the holistic examination of populations, which this ...

Effective approaches to forecast model selection are crucial to improve forecast accuracy and to facilitate the use of forecasts for decision-making processes. Information criteria or cross-validation are common approaches of forecast model selection. ...

The literature on the effects of incentives in survey research is vast and covers a diversity of survey modes. The mode of probability-based online panels, however, is still young and so is research into how to best recruit sample units into the panel. ...

Once recruited, probability-based online panels have proven to enable high-quality and high-frequency data collection. In ever faster-paced societies and, recently, in times of pandemic lockdowns, such online survey infrastructures are invaluable to ...

Representativeness is a foundational yet slippery concept. Though familiar at first blush, it lacks a single precise meaning. Instead, meanings range from typical or characteristic, to a proportionate match between sample and population, to a more ...

Social media data is often used to pulse the opinion of online communities, either by predicting sentiment or stances (e.g., political), to mention just two typical use cases. However, those analysis assume that the data samples really represent the ...

The digital traces of hundreds of millions of people offer increasingly comprehensive pictures of both individuals and groups on different platforms, but also allow inferences about broader target populations beyond those platforms. Studying the errors ...

Today, more than ever, social networks and micro-blogging platforms are used as tools for political exchange. However, these platforms are biased in several aspects, from their algorithms to the population participating in them. With respect to the ...

Hundreds of papers have been published using Twitter data, but few previous papers report the digital divide among Twitter users. British Twitter users are younger, wealthier, and better educated than other Internet users, who in turn are younger, ...

Most operations models assume individuals make decisions based on a perfect understanding of random variables or stochastic processes. In reality, however, individuals are subject to cognitive limitations and make systematic errors. We leverage ...

The past decade has seen a rise in the use of online panels for conducting survey research. However, the popularity of online panels, largely driven by relatively low implementation costs and high rates of Internet penetration, has been met with ...

Web-based interactive systems can be verified and validated with eye tracking which provides valuable insights for understanding user interactions. However, individual eye movements (scanpaths) tend to be complicated and different from each other. ...

This methods paper details an approach for identifying the representativeness of content in a user generated content (UGC) system while also accounting for endogeneity bias. We leverage metadata from an independent content provider to generate sets of ...

Objective. Humans systematically make poor decisions because of cognitive biases. Can digital games train people to avoid cognitive biases? The goal of this study is to investigate the affordance of different educational media in training people about ...

The Internet is considered an attractive option for survey data collection. However, some people do not have access to it. One way to address this coverage problem for general population surveys is to draw a probabilistic sample and provide Internet ...

Over the last decades, modeling of user mobility has become increasingly important in mobile networking research and development. This has led to the adoption of modeling techniques from other disciplines such as kinetic theory or urban planning. Yet ...

Grounded theory is an important research method in empirical software engineering, but it is also time consuming, tedious, and complex. This makes it difficult for researchers to assess if threats, such as missing themes or sample bias, have ...

Today's reference datasets for conducting text entry experiments are only available in English, which may lead to misleading results when testing text entry methods with non-native English speakers. We compared 3 automated phrase sampling methods ...

Structures of real-world networks show varying degrees of importance of the nodes in their surroundings. The topic of evaluating the importance of the nodes offers many different approaches. We present simple and straightforward approach for the ...

In text entry experiments, memorability is a desired property of the phrases used as stimuli. Unfortunately, to date there is no automated method to achieve this effect. As a result, researchers have to use either manually curated English-only phrase ...