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An Online Test for Athletes’ Implicit Doping Attitude

The Doping-IAT is an online Implicit Association Test for evaluating individuals’ implicit attitude towards doping. Particularly, this online tool evaluates the degree to which a person likes or dislikes doping in his/her unconscious mind.  Doping-IAT follows the protocol of a brief single category implicit association test that Chan, Keatley, Tang, Dimmock, and Hagger (2018) applied in their study (using E-Prime) in examining the implicit doping attitude of athletes. However, this study used a specific software (E-Prime) to run the protocol, so the assessment was exclusive to those who have access to E-Prime. Therefore, we have created this online tool to allow more researchers and practitioners to run this implicit doping attitude test without the need of any software. Simply put, this online Doping-IAT is supposed to run on the web browsers of your smartphones or computers and can instantly generate individualized scores, known as “D-Score” without the use of extra software.

Click here to begin the task

*Participants (and researchers) should read the instruction before undertaking the Doping-IAT task.

Instructions

1.     Participants should familiarize with the following categories of the words (stimuli):

2.     The completion of this Doping-IAT task could either be done via a computer or a smartphone with a web browser installed. During the task, words of the above categories will be randomly displayed in the middle of the screen, and participants will categorize the word as fast as they can by pressing left or right “buttons”. 

·      For computer users, please use the arrows “←” and “→” to respond.

·       For smartphone users, please touch left/right boxes on the screen to respond.

3.     Participants must complete two blocks of the Doping-IAT task (i.e., Block A and Block B). Each block is different in terms of the positions of the response categories and its order can be chosen by researchers/participants.

·      In Block A, “Doping/ I Like” categories are on same side and “I Dislike” category is on the other side.

·      In Block B, “Doping/ I Dislike” categories are on the same side and “I Like” is on the other side.

Within each block, the order of the stimuli is randomized.    

4.     The Doping-IAT task in each block starts with a practice trial to let participants familiarize themselves with the response categories, followed by a test trial where participants’ reaction time and accuracy are recorded.

5.     After the completion of the Doping-IAT task, a D-Score (Difference score) that indicates participants’ implicit attitude towards doping will be displayed on the screen.  Additional information such as participants’ average reaction time and accuracy in each Block of the Doping-IAT task will also be displayed. A test ID is also generated at the end of the trial so that researchers may retrieve and download the raw data (in a .CSV file via the home page of the tool) for record and/or further analysis.

How do we calculate the D-Score in this online tool?

The computation of the D-Score in our online tool follows the algorithm of Chan et al., 2018 (computer version).

1.     Block A Score = average reaction time of correct responses between 350ms to 3000ms in Block A

2.     Block B Score = average reaction time of correct responses between 350ms to 3000ms in Block B

3.     SD = Standard deviation of all the correct response times between 350ms to 3000ms in Blocks A and B

4.     D-Score = (Block B Score – Block A Score)/(SD)

As the D-Score for the Doping-IAT could also be processed using different algorithms, we have also provided researchers with the option to download the raw data of the Doping-IAT task for further analysis, data-cleaning, or storage. The .CSV spreadsheet of the Doping-IAT task is available on the results page at the end of the task or after the individual’s test ID of the Doping-IAT task is entered on the home page. *Note: Time/date on the csv file is in the Hong Kong time zone and the response time recorded is in seconds (s).

What does the D-Score mean?

A positive D-Score denotes a greater implicit association towards doping, whilst a negative D-Score, denotes a stronger implicit association to dislike doping. In other words, the D-Score is an indicator of the extent to which someone holds positive or negative implicit attitude towards doping. It is very important to note that a positive D-Score DOES NOT necessarily mean that the person will dope. More research is still needed to determine the threshold of D-Score that indicates if someone is at higher or lower risk of doping.