GENTLE
The Graphical Ego-Network Tool for Longitudinal Examination (GENTLE) allows researchers to easily gather data about social networks. Gentle is a frontend framework in which researchers can select modular components to achieve their research goals. With every answer participants enrich and modify the visualization of their social network system - which is both intuitive and playful, as illustrated in our demo. Repeated assessments with Gentle allow for the identification of social network changes over time.
Goals:
With Gentle we had five aims: (1) To create an easy and efficient assessment of ego-networks (2) which can be completed by large samples (3) using a webpage with the user experience of an app (4) while keeping the components highly modular to optimize reusability by other researchers and (5) to enjoy the process.
Key Characteristics:
- Dynamic Interaction with a visualization of one's ego-network
- Possibility to return to previous questions to modify the network
- Deeplinking - linking to specific parts of the visualization allows longitudinal re-examination
- GENTLE runs on React and relies on D3.js for the visualization
Please cite as:
Krause, J., Jeronimus, B.F. (2019). GENTLE: The Graphical Ego-Network Tool for Longitudinal Examination. www.GENTLE.eu. University of Groningen, the Netherlands.
Take the Demo!We are not collecting any Data during the Demo process.
Copyright and Source Code:
Copyright 2019 J.Krause & B.F.Jeronimus
The source code is available at Github. Gentle is distributed as open software under the MIT license. The software is provided as is, without warranty of any kind. See the Github License Section or the Open Source Initiative for details.
Acknowledgement
The development of Gentle was supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) via a Veni grant (016.195.405) to Bertus F. Jeronimus. We thank Tobias H. Stark and Jon A. Krosnick (2017) and Gert Stulp (2018) for their inspiring work and help. We thank Ando Emerencia for reviewing and improving our code. The faculty board of the Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences of the University of Groningen allowed us to publish Gentle under the terms of the MIT License. Gentle was proposed and initiated by Bertus but co-created with Joshua, who wrote all the code. For questions please contact b.f.jeronimus@rug.nl.