Dear Psychopy,
I am coding my experiment using the trialHandler, and have managed to get nice output files in long format using the trials.saveAsWideText function. This means that each row is a single trial, and I have collumns with repeated values, such as the participant number and run number etc. This is useful for me to run linear mixed models on the data in R. However, I am confused why this is called ‘saveAsWideText’, when typically wide format means that there is one row per subject instead?
It seems to be working as I would like, but perhaps I am misunderstanding the function.
Thank you!
By convention this is still a “wide” format as far as R is concerned because there are multiple columns for different DVs (response, RT, etc.). A “long” format in R has one data point per row, i.e., like the data file you have now except multiple rows per trial, an additional “data type” column, and then all of the actual DVs in a single “value” column.
The main contrast with the other save modes is that this gives you a file you can feed into R more or less directly, while the other save modes save summary statistics but not individual trials. So it’s less a contrast between “wide” and “long”, and more a contrast between “exhaustive” and “summarized”.