COMPARING THE RESULTS OF LABORATORY AND WORLD-WIDE-WEB SAMPLES ON THEDETERMINANTS OF FEMALE ATTRACTIVENESS

The Internet provides a new method to obtain subjects. Arguments suppo rting the use of the Internet as an experimental medium include the ea se of data collection, limited resources needed, and ability to gain a sample more representative of the population. However it has not been demonstrated that the Internet provides the conditions necessary to y ield valid data. This paper compares results from experiments conducte d over the Internet and in a laboratory. Correlating the means from th e Internet samples to the laboratory samples on important interactions yielded values near 1.0, indicating that the two data sets are driven by the same psychological variables. Further evidence of the validity of these Web studies comes from regression analyses. However, more st udies of this sort are needed to further identify what types of experi ments may be validly conducted over the Internet.