Keynote

To record, simply go to the slide that you would like to record for and click Insert → Record Audio. Within Keynote, you can only trim the ends of audio and adjust the volume. For more details on recording audio in Keynote, see (link to Keynote section)

PowerPoint

To record, simply go to the slide that you would like to record for and click Insert → Audio → Record Audio. You can trim audio in PowerPoint but the process is a bit clunky, and we have found that it can sometimes cause the program to crash. For more details on recording audio in PowerPoint, see (link to PowerPoint section)

Quicktime

This tool comes with MacOS and is available to download for free onto Windows.

Voice Recorder

This tool is the preinstalled audio recording tool for Windows computers.

Using the audio tools already available on your computer may be enough for what you need, but in some cases, you may find the additional features of professional-grade software useful for ensuring you have the best audio quality possible for your studies. For example, while the most effective way to fix bad audio recordings is to simply re-record the audio, there might be cases where that is not an option for you (e.g., time constraints, the person who recorded the audio is no longer available). Professional software makes it possible to filter out background noises and to splice together audio in a way that sounds more natural than what you can do with simple audio recording tools.

Some professional-grade tools you might consider are:

Adobe Audition

Adobe Audition is great if you are already using other Adobe products (e.g., Photoshop, Premiere Elements) to design your studies because it has a number of features that allows it to integrate more easily with those other tools. The interface of Audition is clean and easy to navigate, and there's great documentation on how to record audio, edit and trim audio, equalize sound levels across audio files, and edit out background noise/restore audio. This tool is not free, but your university may offer free licenses for Adobe products.

Audacity

Audacity is a free, open-source audio software that offers the same professional sound-editing features as Audition. They have great documentation for how to edit audio in Audacity. This tool is particularly popular with linguists.

If you plan to record your audio using Keynote, it’s helpful to first create blank slides and copy and paste the script to a new Keynote file’s presenter notes section. For instance, this is how the few sentences from our earlier example will look like in Keynote.

First, I'm going to ask you some questions about all the people in the whole wide world! [break – switch to next slide] What kind of car do most families have? A really old and broken car, a really new and nice car, or somewhere in between, like this one, this one, or this one? [break – switch to next slide] What kind of house do most people live in? A really small and broken house, a really big and nice house, or somewhere in between, like this one, this one, or this one? [break – switch to next slide]

The next step will be to arrange the study stimuli (e.g., pictures and animations on your slides). The specific steps to do so will depend on the study that you were converting from.

You have two choices: recording your audio directly through Keynote or importing audio recorded from another application. For more specifics about audio, see our detailed guide on audio recordings.

Recording your audio directly in Keynote

To record, simply go to the slide that you would like to record for and click Insert → Record Audio. When recording, you will want to leave a couple of seconds before and after the sentence to ensure the best audio quality (see general tips for audio here).

After recording, click on the edit button circled below:

Then, trim the recording to cut the extra time before and after the actual recording (as shown below). Be sure to remember to actually click on the scissor icon (as circled below) to ensure that the audio clip trims, and then click Done.

The last step is to click Insert (as below) to ensure that the audio recording is finalized and saved.

Importing audio recorded in another application

Alternatively, if you recorded your audio using another application, you can import audio by simply dragging the audio file from the folder it's stored in directly onto the appropriate Keynote slide(s).

When doing your recordings for each slide, one thing that you will have to keep in mind is how you would like to set up your animations (if needed) for that slide.

Whatever the purpose of it is, the way to set up an animation is the same: simply select the object (i.e., picture, text box, shape, etc.) that you want animated, click Animate at the top-right corner, and select the type of animation you would like to add from the three categories (Build In, Action, Build Out; the Build In and Build Out animations are simply transition animations that will allow the object to appear or disappear, and the Action animation will allow the object to move without appearing or disappearing, such as a jiggle or a slide).

Before exporting, remember to always preview all of your slides first to ensure that the audio recordings and animations run smoothly. One potential issue that sometimes comes up is that the volume might still sound different for different slides. To adjust the volume for each audio clip, click on that specific clip and then select Format on the top right corner. Then, you will be able to adjust for volume (as circled below).

When you have ensured that your slides are ready, there are two ways that you can export your animations: through slide-recording or through manually exporting each slide.

Slide Recording

As you walk through your presentation, you can capture video by screen recording. This strategy of exporting is particularly pertinent if you are narrating your study as the animations play.

Manually exporting videos

To manually export videos, select File → Export To → Movie. You will have to export slide by slide for each video, so enter the slide number that you would like to export for both From and to. Enter 0 for the fields Go to next slide after and Go to next build after and then click Next. Choose the folder in which you wish to save the slides and name the slide by either number or content to help you differentiate between the exported movies (the default name for all the exported movies will always be the name of the Keynote file). Repeat for all of your slides.

This step is fairly straightforward and is the last step before moving to Qualtrics. The only small note for this step is that, sometimes, based on your recording and animation lengths, the last frame in an exported movie might be a black screen. If this happens, feel free to trim the last few milliseconds of your movie to avoid the black screen showing up in your actual survey presentation.

In this slide above, we have five different animations that we want to set up. We want the first house to jiggle at “a really small and broken house”, the fifth house to jiggle at “a really big and nice house”, and the second, third, and fourth house to jiggle at the three “this one’s”, respectively. Using the first method, we will drag the entire 13-second audio recording to the beginning of the Build Order list. For the first animation, we will time how many seconds are supposed to pass before it (i.e., how many seconds before the first house should jiggle). In this case, it should be 2.5 seconds, so we will select After Build 1 under Start and then put in 2.5 seconds under Delay (as circled below).

It is also fine to just guess how long the delays are in between animations, use the Preview button to gauge if it is a little too long or too short, and then adjust accordingly.

Continue the above steps for all your animations on that slide (set Start as After [previous animation] and set Delay to be the number of seconds needed after the previous animation). After working through all the animations, preview them to make sure that they run smoothly.

One issue that we sometimes run into is that the audio might run longer than the last animation – in this case, the audio recording will get cut short after the last animation finishes (e.g., after the fourth house jiggles, the recording might still have not played the word “one”). Most of the time, you do not want to extend the last animation to be longer than necessary (e.g., make the fourth house jiggle for a longer period of time than the other houses), so one way to work around this is to randomly select an object and add a Scale animation to it. Set Scale to be 100% and Duration to be the number of seconds before the audio recording ends (as shown below). That way, the audio will not be cut short until the end of this “animation”.

Taking the same slide as an example, we could also record separate recordings for each animation (“What kind of house do most people live in?”/ “A really small and broken house,”/ “a really big and nice house,”/ “or somewhere in between, like this one, this one, or this one?”). A benefit of using this method is the possibility of recycling audio recordings when there are certain sentences/clips you will need for multiple slides (e.g., in this study, we use “or somewhere in between, like this one, this one, or this one?” ten times and by recycling this clip, we can both save time and ensure consistency). A tip for using this method is to place the multiple recording clips over their corresponding objects/animations (as shown below). This way, you can easily remember which audio recording goes in which place. One added benefit to this method is that recycling clips is often ideal for different conditions in a study, since you can ask the same question identically across conditions if you use the same audio clip.

The rest of the building order process is about the same as the previous method. Another benefit of using this method is that it usually decreases the number of times you need to estimate delay times, because for audio clips and animations that go together, you can just directly select “With [previous build]” for Start and not put anything for Delay.

One potential problem with using this method, though, is that your recordings might not flow as well as with the previous method. One way to work around this is to still do the audio recording in one session and then just split it to multiple clips based on your animations (to do so, copy and paste as needed and then trim). Another way to deal with it is to combine this method with the previous method when necessary. For example, for really short sentences (e.g., “this one, this one, or this one”), it may not be as necessary to have a separate clip for each animation, so we can just have one clip for the last three animations, but separate clips for the first two animations.

This strategy is very similar to one previously described, except that all recordings are done in a different audio recording software, such as QuickTime. After individually recording each audio clip, you can simply drag the audio file (saved to your Desktop, or to another easily accessible folder) into the appropriate Keynote slide(s). The audio file will automatically become incorporated into your animation Build Order; as a default, it will be set to start “On Click.” Once all of the audio recordings have been imported into Keynote and arranged as you would like in the Build Order (whether each is timed to occur after a certain number of seconds, as in Strategies 1-2, or each is set to start “On Click”), it is time to record your slide(s). You can do so either using the screen record function, as described in Strategies 1-2, or by recording directly in Keynote. To do so, you can use the “record slideshow“ feature in Keynote (navigate to Play → Record Slideshow). Here, you can either just click once to start the set of pre-timed animations and audio recordings, or you can click on each animation/audio recording as you go if they have been set in your Build Order to “On Click.” Once your recording is done, you will export it as a movie file (see Step 7); only once a recording is exported can you clear it from Keynote (Play → Clear Recording) and start recording a new slide.

Another approach to recording your slide is to arrange all animations to start “On Click”, and to use the “Record Slideshow” feature in Keynote (navigate to Play → Record Slideshow). This is very similar to the other screen-recording option in Strategy #5, where you click at timepoints when you want your animation to play. However, in this approach, you are narrating your presentation in real-time, rather than using pre-recorded audio clips. Some of the benefits to using this feature are that (1) your presenter notes will be available to you at the bottom of the page to organize and read through, (2) you can clearly keep track of how long your recording is, and (3) you can see the upcoming animation “builds” or slides on the left side panel, as a reminder (see image below). Using this strategy, you will want to export into video format after each recording, by clicking File → Export To → Movie.

Similar to the first method, you can do all your recordings for each slide within one audio clip. Arrange the audio to be at the beginning of your animations (as shown below). Then, arrange the order of your animations as desired and select “On Click” under Start for each animation. Then, record your slides by using the “Record Slideshow” feature described above in Strategy #5. While presenting, click at timepoints when you require an animation (e.g., click for the first time when the audio plays “a really small and broken house” so that the first house will jiggle).

You might think that it’s intuitive to have your survey structured so that each block contains a single task in your study. However, we have found it useful to have separate blocks for each trial because it allows you to keep track of when participants are completing each trial. Qualtrics allows you to record timing data for the onset and offset of any block, but not the onset and offset of questions within a block.

With that timing data from the onset and offset of a block, you can use Datavyu to sync children’s responses on Qualtrics with the participant’s webcam video (see here for more detailed instructions about how to record the timing of blocks, and how to import this information into Datavyu to link it to the participant’s video). This allows you to know exactly which trial a child is seeing throughout the video. This is useful for a variety of reasons, including being able to exclude individual trials in which there was possible interference without having to discard all of the participant’s data (see here for more information on interference and the role of parents), or allows you to easily match children’s verbal responses to the questions or stimuli they saw.

Type #1: Creating buttons over still images using the Hot Spot question function in Qualtrics

Using the hotspot feature allows you to layer “buttons” over still images, so that children can signal their answer choice by clicking on an image rather than a word. In our experience, this allows for an easier and more accessible study experience, particularly for child participants.

To begin, you will want to export or screenshot the image of your question page (typically the last build of the video you would have previously uploaded). Next, navigate to your Qualtrics survey, then click “Add new question”, and change question type to “Hot Spot”. Upload the image of your question page either by clicking “select a graphic to use for this question”, or "choose graphic" in the left panel. You can then click "Upload a new graphic" to select an image on your computer, or select an image already saved in your Qualtrics graphics library. Make sure to adjust the width of the image appropriately (this width should match the width of the video). If your slide includes your question text, as shown in the example below, you will want to remove the sample text in the box above your image by deleting what is in the text box, and leaving a literal space “ ” otherwise Qualtrics automatically pipes in the prompt “Click to write the question text” again).

Once your image is loaded into Qualtrics, click on “Add Region” in the panel on the left, and a highlighted box will appear. Click and drag the corners of the highlighted box to resize it, and move it over what you would like to be the clickable “area” on your question image (i.e., where you want it to indicate a response; Note: For developmental research, you might want to make the clickable region a little bit bigger than the actual image you are layering it over to allow some “buffer”). Click on the text box underneath the highlighted area to manually enter a name/label for that area (see example below; Note: This text will not display to participants taking the study, but will appear in your data export when that region is selected).

The Hotspot feature has three main customizable options that you can select based on your question type: (1) interaction type, (2) target visibility, and (3) response requirements (please see area outlined in red, in the example image above). Interaction type refers to the way you want participants to interact with the question type. Selecting On/Off means that participants will be able to “click” or “unclick” a region to indicate their response (and will probably be the most straightforward for children), while selecting Dislike - Like allows participants to express “like”, “dislike”, or “neutral” affect toward the stimuli in that region. Target visibility refers to whether or not you want participants to know that the regions you have highlighted are clickable areas. Qualtrics allows you to make regions “Hidden until hover”, or “always visible” (typically the default). Lastly, response requirements set parameters to how participants can respond to the question. Selecting “Minimum regions selected” forces participants to choose a certain amount of answers, and will not allow them to move forward until they have done so (however, you should check whether this option is permissible under your university’s IRB). Answer range allows you to set even more detailed parameters for how participants will respond. For most of our questions that ask participants to make a binary decision, we select the Answer range option, and enter a "0" in the “Min” box (to not force participants to make a decision), but enter a “1” in the “Max” box, so that participants are restricted from making more than one selection.

Currently, the description above only includes instructions for formatting square/rectangular clickable regions over images. However, Qualtrics does have the capability to create regions in customizable shapes. More information on Qualtrics’ Hot Spot function can be found here.

Type #2: Use a still screen of the question page and insert images as buttons below it

This is a very easy and straightforward way to create a response question. Export a still image of your desired question page either by exporting your slides as pictures instead of movies (exact same steps except select Export To Images instead of Movies) or by taking a screenshot of the last frame. Then, upload the picture to a new question immediately following the video with the same image as the last frame (again, exact same steps as uploading a movie except select the picture icon instead of the movie icon). Remember to set the width to be the same as the width you set for the previous movie to ensure a smooth transition between the questions. Add your response choices below the still image. (You will also want to set the previous movie slide to auto-advance to the following response slide; for instructions on how to do so, please refer to # 2 under Step 10.)

As you can probably tell with some images, one limitation of this method is that it only works well when the options are presented evenly and horizontally so that you can easily set up the multiple choices to be directly below the corresponding choices in the picture. In some cases, you can work around this limitation by setting up the multiple choices to directly be picture choices. To do so, select Rich Content Editor within each of your choices (as shown below) and then upload the respective pictures you would like to present as choices.

Type #3: Directly insert response options below video

This method is the quickest way to set up response choices but only works for certain types of studies/questions. For example, if the participant is old enough to read independently and the choices are simple text choices, you can directly set up the video within a multiple-choice question in Qualtrics and just set the text choices directly beneath it (see below for an example).

However, one thing to consider when using this method is whether or not you want the participant to be able to respond to the question before the video stops playing (to avoid this, use the timing function; for instructions on how to do so, please refer to # 4 under Step 10). Another thing to consider is whether or not it matters for your study if the participant sees the choices before finishing watching the video (see advanced sections for how to do this).

To add media to individual trials, you will have to select different question types depending on your needs. To display ONLY a graphic (image or video), add a Text/Graphic question type and select what you want to display from the “Content Type” dropdown menu. For images, choose the “Graphic” option. For displaying videos, select “Text” from the dropdown menu, then enter the Rich Content Editor, and click on the movie icon (you might have to click on “More” to see it). Next, click on Select File From Library → Upload a New File → Choose File and then select the video you would like to upload. After clicking on Save, wait for the preview to show and then click on Advanced to enter your desired width and height (typical to set width as 720 or 800, which is about full screen – however, feel free to adjust based on your study’s needs). The width and height ratio should be automatically locked, so just entering width is enough. If your graphic already includes the relevant text, you will want to remove the sample text in the box above your image by deleting the existing text, and leaving a literal space “ ” (otherwise, Qualtrics automatically pipes in the prompt “Click to write the question text” again). Click Insert to save and finish.

Timing data is useful because it allows you to match up what the child was doing in the webcam video with what was happening onscreen in the study.

To embed timing information in Qualtrics, the first step is making sure that trials are divided into separate blocks within your Qualtrics study. The reason for this is that you can embed data before and after a block, but not within a block, so you can’t track the exact timing of questions within a block. Once you have trials in separate blocks, you can then set the timing information using Survey Flow in Qualtrics.

1. In your study, click on Survey Flow
2. On the right-hand side of your first block, click “Add Below”
3. A new cell will appear asking, “What do you want to add?” Choose “Embedded Data”
   
   
4. Once you select Embedded Data, you will be prompted to “Create New Field or Choose From Dropdown.
   
   
5. First, you need to set the participant ID so that this information gets passed from the web platform to your Qualtrics survey. To do this, just click into the “Create New Field…” window, and enter “ID”
   
   
6. This embedded data should be placed as the first element in your survey flow, so click “Move” and move it to the beginning of your study
7. Next, you need to tell Qualtrics you want to keep track of timing by setting the Total Duration. Again, click Add Below 🡪 Embedded Data. Then from the dropdown menu, choose: Survey Metadata 🡪 Total Duration Q_TotalDuration. Move this embedded data to the beginning of your study, just after ID
8. You can now embed onsets and offset before and after every block you want to keep track of. To do this, again click Add Below 🡪 Embedded Data. Then click into the dropdown menu and name the data you are embedding.
9. You can name this whatever you want (it will be the name of a column in your Qualtrics output), but we typically name ours something like this:
   
   • XXX_onset
   • XXX (Trial Block)
   • XXX_offset
10. Type in your embedded data name, then click on “Set a Value Now” and where it says Custom Value:
    
    
    
    Enter this code: ${e://Field/Q_TotalDuration}
    This basically tells Qualtrics, “record the time right now.”
11. Repeat to add onsets and offsets for every block you want to time throughout your study.
12. You can structure this is a few different ways. The simplest is just to have everything lined up in the Survey Flow exactly as it appears. So, for example, if I have a trial called “trial1,” I can embed timing data like this:
    
    
13. Often we have more complicated designs though—maybe we want to show trials in counterbalanced or random order. If you present multiple trial blocks and their timing all together in random order, you would have no way of knowing what you were timing! So, for these designs, you can split each trial block and its embedded timing into separate groups, then just randomize the presentation of the groups, like this:
    
    
14. Repeat the onsets and offsets for any sections you want to time. These can time multiple blocks, for instance if you have several blocks for consent and really only need to know the start and end of the entire consent portion of your study. In that case you can just add embedded data for “consent_onset” before the consent trial blocks, and embedded data for “consent_offset” after the consent blocks. But keep in mind that you can’t time trials within a block using this method.

To enable your videos to play automatically, click on the video that you want to set up and then select HTML View. Delete the first “<” at the beginning and paste these two lines of code:

<video id="vidid" autoplay = "autoplay" width = "100%" video class="qmedia" preload="auto" <source This is what your code should look like (the bolded lines being the newly pasted lines):
<video id="vidid" autoplay = "autoplay" width = "100%" video class="qmedia" preload="auto" <source src="https://nyu.qualtrics.com/CP/File.php?F=F_eg0dkiCIvJlMYWG" type="video/mp4" /><embed align="middle" autoplay="false" bgcolor="white" class="qmedia" controller="true" height="768" pluginspage="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/" src="https://nyu.qualtrics.com/CP/File.php?F=F_eg0dkiCIvJlMYWG" type="video/quicktime" width="1024" /></video>
Switch back to Normal View and the video should now be auto-playing.

To set a video to auto-advance after a set amount of time, select the question that contains the video you wish to set up and add a new question directly below it.

Now, select Timing under Question Type. Here, you can choose to either (a) delay showing the submit button to “hold” participants on a page, or (b) enter the number of seconds that you would like the video to auto-advance after. One tip is to set this up (if needed) before setting up the auto-play function, because after you do so, the length of the video no longer shows up by default in Qualtrics, so you would need to go back to your raw videos to check the number of seconds you should enter. Another tip is that when entering the number of seconds, it might be a good idea to round up or even add a couple of seconds (feel free to adjust for more or fewer seconds based on the length and size of your video and how much your test/pilot runs lag) since poor internet connection might sometimes cause videos to lag for a couple of seconds when playing, and you want to ensure that the participant sees the full video.

1. Add JavaScript for the question with the video, and paste this:

Qualtrics.SurveyEngine.addOnload(function() { /Place your JavaScript here to run when the page loads/});Qualtrics.SurveyEngine.addOnReady(function() { var video = jQuery("#vidid"); var preview = false; if(/^\/jfe[0-9]?\/preview/.test(window.location.pathname)) preview = true; if(preview) { if(jQuery('.MobilePreviewFrame:first').length > 0) { var vidEl = video.get(0); vidEl.muted = true; vidEl.width = "300"; } } $('NextButton').hide(); video.on('ended', function(event) { $('NextButton').click(); }); });Qualtrics.SurveyEngine.addOnUnload(function() { /Place your JavaScript here to run when the page is unloaded/});
2. Go into HTML view and remove the first "<" in there and instead add this line: <video id="vidid" controls = "controls" autoplay = "autoplay" width = "100%"
So, for example, this is what it looks like for my study question: <video id="vidid" controls = "controls" autoplay = "autoplay" width = "100%" video class="qmedia" controls="true" preload="auto" <source src="https://nyu.qualtrics.com/CP/File.php?F=F_eg0dkiCIvJlMYWG" type="video/mp4" /><embed align="middle" autoplay="false" bgcolor="white" class="qmedia" controller="true" height="768" pluginspage="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/" src="https://nyu.qualtrics.com/CP/File.php?F=F_eg0dkiCIvJlMYWG" type="video/quicktime" width="1024" /></video>
3. (optional) Remove the controls functions (i.e., the controls="true" in the second line AND the controls = “controls” text in the first line) if you would like to remove the video progress bar: <video id="vidid" autoplay = "autoplay" width = "100%" video class="qmedia" preload="auto" <source src="https://nyu.qualtrics.com/CP/File.php?F=F_eg0dkiCIvJlMYWG" type="video/mp4" /><embed align="middle" autoplay="false" bgcolor="white" class="qmedia" controller="true" height="768" pluginspage="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/" src="https://nyu.qualtrics.com/CP/File.php?F=F_eg0dkiCIvJlMYWG" type="video/quicktime" width="1024" /></video>
4. (optional) Remove the auto-advance setting in the timing question below if it was previously set and enter/keep the enable submit setting as needed (see below for example):

By default, when you set up questions in Qualtrics, participants will need to click on a submit arrow after each question to submit their responses. If you would like participants’ surveys to automatically advance after clicking their response, you will need to set up this auto-advance function. (The main thing to consider when deciding whether or not this is needed is whether or not you would prefer participants be able to change their mind about their answers – if not, you would likely prefer to have this function set up, but if so, you would likely prefer to keep the submit arrow button.)

To enable auto-advancing for participant responses, select the question that you would like to add the function to and click on the settings icon beneath it (as circled below).

Then, select Add JavaScript and paste these lines of code:

Qualtrics.SurveyEngine.addOnload(function() { this.questionclick = function(event,element){ $('NextButton').click(); }; }); Qualtrics.SurveyEngine.addOnReady(function() { /*Place your JavaScript here to run when the page is fully displayed*/ }); Qualtrics.SurveyEngine.addOnUnload(function() { /*Place your JavaScript here to run when the page is unloaded*/ });
Click on Save to finish.

Follow the exact same instructions as for auto-advancing functions (# 2 in this list), except enter in the number of seconds that you would like to disable submitting responses for participants under Auto-advance after (seconds) instead.

Before launching, it is a good idea to go through the study link a couple of times to ensure that the study runs smoothly. If your study has narrated videos, the preview function in Qualtrics will have echoing audio (since it previews simultaneously for computer and for phone). One way to work around this is to simply test the survey through the anonymous link under Distributions → Anonymous Link. Just remember to filter out any test runs you might have done when you are analyzing the data.

Once the study seems to be complete and running smoothly, you should be good to go to start collecting child development data online!