Barrera-Causil Carlos J, Correa Juan Carlos, Marmolejo-Ramos Fernando
Davinci Research Group, Faculty of Applied and Exact Sciences, Metropolitan Technological Institute, Medellín, Colombia.
Escuela de Estadística, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Medellín, Colombia.
Front Psychol. 2019 Apr 23;10:862. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00862. eCollection 2019.
Elicitation methods aim to build participants' distributions about a parameter of interest. In most elicitation studies this parameter is rarely known in advance and hinders an objective comparison between elicitation methods. In two experiments, participants were first presented with a fixed random sequence of images and numbers and subsequently their subjective distributions of percentages of one of those numbers was elicited. Importantly, the true percentage was set in advance. The first experiment tested whether receiving instructions as to the elicitation method would assist in estimating a true value more accurately than receiving no instructions and whether accuracy was determined by the numerical skills of the participants. The second experiment sought to compare the elicitation method used in the first experiment with a variation of a graphical elicitation method. The results indicate that (i) receiving instructions as to the elicitation method does assist in producing estimates closer to a true percentage value, (ii) the level of numerical skills does not play a part in the accuracy of the estimation (Experiment 1), and (iii) although the average estimates of the betting and graphical method are not significantly different, the betting method leads to more precise estimations than the graphical method (Experiment 2). Both studies featured statistical procedures (functional data analysis and a novel clustering technique) not considered in past research on the elicitation of subjective distributions. The implications of these results are discussed in relation to a recent key study.
诱导方法旨在构建参与者关于感兴趣参数的分布。在大多数诱导研究中，这个参数很少是事先已知的，这阻碍了对诱导方法进行客观比较。在两项实验中，首先向参与者展示一系列固定的图像和数字的随机序列，随后引出他们对其中一个数字所占百分比的主观分布。重要的是，真实百分比是事先设定的。第一个实验测试了接受关于诱导方法的指导是否比不接受指导更有助于更准确地估计真实值，以及准确性是否由参与者的数字技能决定。第二个实验旨在将第一个实验中使用的诱导方法与一种图形诱导方法的变体进行比较。结果表明：（i）接受关于诱导方法的指导确实有助于得出更接近真实百分比值的估计；（ii）数字技能水平在估计准确性方面不起作用（实验1）；（iii）尽管投注法和图形法的平均估计没有显著差异，但投注法比图形法能得出更精确的估计（实验2）。这两项研究都采用了过去关于主观分布诱导的研究中未考虑的统计程序（功能数据分析和一种新颖的聚类技术）。结合最近的一项关键研究讨论了这些结果的意义。
