Social Sciences & LabVIEW

[Kovacs]

I'd like to know if LabVIEW has been used by any (social science) researchers for their experiments.

I'm planning to use LabVIEW for an experiment of my own, but I'm just a student and don't have much knowledge on the matter. I'll be using it for data collection, but my teacher is inclined to use E-Prime for the actual experiment (which is widely used by psychologists). This might pose some problems so I'd like to know if LabVIEW could be used instead.

[RavensFan]

I remember seeing some post in the not too distant past where someone was doing some gaming in LabVIEW.  Or also some reaction time type of drills.  I'm not sure how I would search for that one to find the links again.

[Chris_Garratt_NIUK]

Hi Kovacs,

I have completed some of these social science questionnaires before and have seen some of the code behind what they were trying to do. These were written in C# I think and were very complicated. I can definitely see the benefits of using LabVIEW for your work. If you can give me some more information about your work I may be able to give you an example of what you can do.

Academic institution are also eligible for large discounts on the software and from the information you have given you would only need the basic edition.

Hope this helps,

Chris

[Chris_Garratt_NIUK]

Hey again,

Had a little spare time at work and thought I'd show you how you could throw something together.

I don't know how much of LabVIEW you have seen but you can make the user interface much more attractive!

[johnsold]

Kovacs,

I have built several systems used by exercise physiologists and psychologists for various types of stimulus/response experiments. The biggest issue is access to the signals for timing purposes.  If you use a desktop operating system and want to present a visual stimulus, then measure the response via the mouse or the keyboard, you have the difficulty that the OS gets between the program and the outputs and inputs and adds latencies which are hard to measure. This is true for any program.  Some programs may have hooks into the OS which gets some timing data.  If you are using an external A/D converter and have extra channels available to measure the stimulus, you can do quite well with LV.

An article in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering (July 2010) addresses this issue.

Lynn

[Kovacs]

Thank you all for your answers (and chrisag for even supplying an example), they have been very informative.

I'm going to look into this a bit further, this looks very promising indeed.

[KDP]

Dear Chris:

Hi, I read your response on the inquiry about social science method in LabVIEW programming by googling.

I, as a graduate student at the University of Florida, am in the process of learning LabVIEW for the first time in my life in a graduate class. And I certainly struggling with the lack of programming knowledge. So, I'd like to ask you to please send me some example VI made for social science questionnaires in LabVIEW.

This is my email: parkks5@gmail.com

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

David

[johnsold]

David,

This thread is two years old and Chris has not logged in to the Forums since August.  So you may not get a response.

Lynn