Data
Overview
This guide describes how to access your participant data from your experiment. Check out the topics in the menu for guidance on each step.
For guidance on how to analyse your data once you've downloaded it, check out our Data Analysis Guide.
Generating data
Before you can download your data, you first need to generate it. Data can be generated from the Data tab in the Experiment Builder.
In New Experiment Builder, the data generation panel appears by default. In Classic Experiment Builder, you can access it by clicking 'Download Experiment Data'.
To generate data from a specific task or questionnaire, click the task or questionnaire node.
In both cases, you will then see the data generation options:
The screenshots on this page show the new Experiment Builder interface. If you’re still using the classic interface, it will appear slightly different.
First, decide how you want to combine your data. By default, Gorilla will generate a separate file for each node, for the currently selected version of your experiment only. Use the checkboxes to optionally combine data across versions, across multiple tasks, and/or across multiple questionnaires. For more information on the different options, see the Combining Data section.
Select what file type you’d like your data to be downloaded in: XLSX or CSV (comma, semicolon or tab delineated).
You have the option to unblind your data, which displays Public IDs along with Private IDs in your data, meaning that your participants could potentially be identified.
You can also select the timeframe of data you’d like to download: all data, from today, from the last five days, or from a custom time period.
Task data will be generated in Long-Format (one row per trial). Check out our guide to Data Format for more information, and follow our walkthrough on how to clean and transform your data into Short-Form using R.
For Questionnaire data, you have the option to download data in either Long-Form or Short-Format (one row per participant). If you have chosen to combine data from multiple questionnaires into one short-form data file, you have a few options on how different questionnaires get combined - see the Combining Data section for more information.
Scores calculated in the Scoring tab in Questionnaire Builder 2 are included in both short-form and long-form data. However, other data from the Store in Questionnaire Builder 2, and from the Script widget in Questionnaire Builder 1, are not included in short-form data. If you want to include other Store data, or any data from a script widget, download the long-form version.
If you select short form data, you can also choose whether you want your column headers to use the name and the unique ID of the associated questionnaire object (to guarantee uniqueness) or just the object name (if you have already given your questionnaire objects unique names). You can also optionally choose to add a second header row to your questionnaire data containing the full text of each question.
If you select long form data, you can choose to include additional questionnaire metrics. If this box is ticked, your questionnaire data will include detailed information on participants' interactions with your questionnaire, such as whether they went back to a previous page and changed their answers. See our guide to understanding your data for more information and examples.
Once you are happy with the options you have selected, click Generate. Generating data does not affect your tokens, and you can generate your data an unlimited number of times.
If your data have not generated within 1 hour, a Regenerate Data button will appear. Click it to try generating your data again:
If your data still have not generated after 24 hours, please Contact Us! Once your data have generated, you can then download your data.
Combining data
By default, Gorilla will generate a separate file for each node, for the currently selected version of your experiment only. The 'Combine data' checkboxes on the data generation panel allow you to specify how you want your data to be combined.
Using these checkboxes, you can choose to combine data from
- multiple experiment versions
- multiple tasks
- multiple questionnaires
into one file.
For long-format data, data from each additional version, task, or questionnaire is simply appended to the data file as extra rows.
For short-format questionnaire data, in New Experiment Builder, you can choose if you want data from multiple questionnaires to be combined into one row per participant.
Combining short-form data
If you select 'Short Form' under Questionnaire data form and tick 'Combine all questionnaire nodes into one file', two further options appear. These are selected by default:
If you leave the checkboxes selected and click Generate Data, responses from:
- all different questionnaires in the experiment, and
- all repeats of questionnaires contained within a Repeat Node
will all be combined into one row per participant in the data file.
To help you identify which responses came from which questionnaire, column names for each response will have the prefix [Repeat Key] [Questionnaire Node Key].
If you toggle off 'Merge different questionnaires into one row per participant', responses from each different questionnaire in the experiment will be on a separate row.
If you toggle off 'Merge repeated questionnaires into one row per participant', responses from each iteration of each repeated questionnaire will be on a separate row.
If you toggle off both Merge options, each different questionnaire in the experiment will have its responses on a separate row, and each iteration of each repeated questionnaire will have its responses on a separate row. Column names will not have the [Repeat Key] [Questionnaire Key] prefix.
Downloading data
Once your data has successfully generated, you will see a 'Download Data' button:
The screenshots on this page show the new Experiment Builder interface. If you’re still using the classic interface, it will appear slightly different.
Click Download Data to download your data.
Large data sets
By default, Gorilla zips your data files into a single archive for you to download. However, for large data sets, this can cause the generation process to stall. To prevent this, Gorilla will not create a zip archive for datasets that exceed a given size. Instead, a 'Download All Files' button will appear, allowing you to download all files with a single click:
In New Experiment Builder, clicking the button to start the download shows a count of how many files have downloaded and how many there are in total:
If your data file is blank, check on the Participants tab that participants have completed the version you’ve downloaded data for, and that any incomplete participants whose data you want to download have been included.
To regenerate your data with different settings, scroll down past the Download Data button, select your preferred settings, and click Regenerate Data.
If you have collected new participants since the last time you downloaded your data, you will need to generate your data before downloading it.
To find out how to understand and analyse your data, check out our Gorilla data analysis guide.
If you experience any issues downloading your data, contact our support team.
If you want to download data that contains special characters (for example, a participant entering a text response in Greek), we recommend downloading the data as an XLSX file. In some cases, special characters may not display correctly in CSV files.
Accessing individual participant data
To download data from a specific participant, go to the Participants Tab. To access all data from all participants, see the generating data section of this guide.
In the Participants tab, locate the participant whose data you want to download. Click the Actions button, and select 'Download Data'. You can only download data from participants that have Completed the experiment, or have been manually included in the dataset.
The screenshots on this page show the new Experiment Builder interface. If you’re still using the classic interface, it will appear slightly different.
Once you click Download Data, you will be able to choose the format and filetype of the data, and whether you would like to Unblind the data.
Click Generate Data to generate this participant's data.
If your data have not generated within 1 hour, a Regenerate Data button will appear. Click it to try generating your data again:
If your data still have not generated after 24 hours, please Contact Us! Once your data have generated, you can then download your data.
Combining data across tasks and questionnaires
While you can combine data from tasks into a single file, and data from questionnaires into a single file, Gorilla cannot automatically aggregate task and questionnaire data into one file.
We have a couple of guides to help you combine data across tasks and questionnaires. We have created an R Studio walkthrough and a video guide in Excel which provide more details on how to combine data across tasks and questionnaires.
Understanding and analysing data
Everything you need to know about understanding your data can be found in our Data Analysis guide.
Check it out to understand:
- Data format
- What each data column means
- How to tidy your data ready for analysis in Excel and RStudio
- How to handle advanced data such as mousetracking and eyetracking