Step-by-step Instructions for using eSocMet

* Step 1: Type in http://eszocmet.hu/

into your browser and in the window that pops up type "login" (without quotation marks) to go to the registration interface.

*Step 2: On the next page you can register. Please enter your details so that we can contact you by email in case of developments/changes affecting all eSzocMet users.

*Step 3: The first task on the interface is to enter your secret key by pressing the "enter new key" button at the top-middle section of the screen. The secret key encodes the personal data, you will also need it later to be able to view the results. The program will only show the names of the children in the finished reports if you enter the original key.

Different tests on the same account may have different secret keys.

After each login you should do this step first, the system will also warn you if no secret key is entered.

For security reasons, the secret key is not stored by the system in any form and cannot be replaced. If someone forgets the secret key, the previously entered sociometric data - including names - which were conducted with that key will no longer be available.

*Step 4: After entering the secret key, click on the "start new test" option and fill in the institution and class details and give the test a name and a motto. Students will be able to access their questionnaire by entering the motto and the secret key, they will not see the name of the test.

***Step 5: ** The new test will then appear under ‘My Tests’ menu item. Click on "..." in the top right corner to access the menu. Questions can be added under the ‘Questions’ menu item.

If you wish to choose from already existing questions, we recommend our three standardised questionnaires, one for juniors, one for seniors and one for secondary school students. Any of these can be supplemented with questions on bullying and/or classification-sociometry.

If you prefer to enter your own questions, you can do so under the "New question" menu item. Be sure to enter the category of the question, otherwise the program will not be able to interpret the answers. It is also worth setting the order in which the question should appear in the questionnaire under the sequence button.

!Negative questions should not be ues because the program algorithm cannot work with them and the questionnaire containing such a question will result in an incorrect report.

All questions to which the given answers decrease the overall score of the category and not increase it, are considered negative.

For example, the following questions would produce a false report in eSzocMet, so do not ask questions like these:

• Popularity: Who is least liked by the others?
• Ability: Who is the worst student in maths in the class?
• Function: Who is the least likely to be able to organise an afternoon activity?
• Sympathy: If you had to choose three people who would definitely be in a different apartment than you on a class trip, who would they be?

*** Step 6: **Once you have uploaded the desired number of questions, you will be asked to add the list of names. This can be done manually by entering the class roster or automatically. If you want to do it manually (this is the recommended option), you have two options:

- Click on the "Roster" menu item and add the class members one by one using the "new name" button. In order to draw the sociogram, it is essential that you enter the initials and gender of the children in addition to the names. If you have chosen this option, do not click on the "Open registration" button.

- Using the ‘Import Names’ button, you can copy the names of children from an excel sheet using ctrl+c - ctrl+v, after which eSzocMet will automatically generate monograms based on the names (but these can be modified later under the children's names as described above).

Gender cannot be set automatically by the system in this version so there are two options presented below:

- You can import girls and boys in two separate tables, and setting the scrolling menu (boy/girl) under the chart accordingly.

- After importing the complete roster, you can change the gender of the children one by one in the roster, so if you import the whole roster as male, you can change it one by one by clicking on the girls' names or vice versa.

If there are two students with the same initials (if you have imported the names, it is worth checking) use some kind of distinction, otherwise the program will not be able to list all the students in the ripot (e.g. Anna Mint, Arnold Mindszenty - MintAn, MindAr; the abbreviation displayed in the summary may consist of more than two letters).

Regarding names, the system cannot handle special characters. Apart from the hyphen (which is often used for double names and can certainly be processed by the program), only letters should be used.

!For advanced users only!

If you wish to do this step automatically, click on option ’Open registration’. This will prompt students to enter their secret key and motto following which  the system will ask for their names. Once everyone has entered their name (it is worth asking for their full name to avoid any confusion), click on the ‘Close Registration’ button. This step replaces adding the list of names, however it requires a lot of discipline and has a large potential for error.

*** Step 7: **If you have completed the first six steps, your questionnaire is ready for students to complete. Double-check whether all questions are in the correct order and that there are no mistakes in the children's names. It is imperative that all data be entered accurately because once activated, no changes can be made to it, and if a child's name is entered incorrectly, the system may not recognise the nominations that he/she gets or there can be problems in the report file!

If a name is entered more than once by mistake, or if you want to delete a name from a test for some other reason, click on the child's name in the roster and you can remove it from the roster by clicking on the delete button.

IMPORTANT! You can only delete a name from a test that has not yet been activated, so it is very important to check for mistakes before the activation!

If a child's name is deleted by the test administrator from an active or closed test, the report will be lost and cannot be restored, so it is always necessary to check that those (and only those) children who will eventually complete the test are included in the roster.

If a problem occurs in this process post the problem here in the group or send us a private message!
If everything is correct, click on activate next to the questionnaire. Children should go to the eszocmet website (http://app.eszocmet.hu/) and on the opening page enter the motto and secret key given by you. Once this is done, they will have to enter their name and then the test will be displayed.

The test should be completed by having the respondents start typing the name of their choice in the appropriate answer box. After the first three letters are typed, the program will offer a drop-down menu of names that contain that combination. By entering more letters, the list reduces.

Three answers can be given for the sympathy and bullying questions and ten for all other question types. If one wishes to keep the limit of three according to the Mérei method, the limit must be communicated verbally to the respondents, as there is no such setting in the program.

Children should be warned in advance that for some questions they may be able to give a different number of answers.

* Step 8: When everyone is finished with all the questions, click on the close button. This step cannot be undone later, so it is very important that you only close the questionnaire once all answers have been received without any problem!

You can check the status of the questionnaire by clicking on the list of names in the menu (marked with ‘...’ in the top right corner of the test) before closing the questionnaire. There are three statuses: If you see a date and a time next to the name, the test is complete and has been submitted at that time. If it says "open" then the test taker is still working on the test and hasn't given all the answers yet. If you see a "-" it means that the test taker has not yet opened the test. Only close the test once the date appears next to each name.

Step ***9: ** If everything is ready, the program will immediately run the sociometric analysis.

After closing the questionnaire, you can see the frequency and reciprocity tables and some other indicators calculated by the program based on Mérei's formulae under the report tab in the menu.

• The Reciprocity table shows who chose who in the group and how many times.
• The Mutual Relationships table shows the reciprocal relationships of children who choose each other.
• Under the Frequency table, you can see how many choices each child received for certain questions.
• The Summary table shows how many outgoing and incoming choices, and how many reciprocal relationships a given child has, along with how many choices he/she received in each category.
• Under structural, functional and role indicators, various indicators of the class are listed.
• The Graph shows a visual representation of the responses received by category (sympathy, function, popularity, ability).
  The number of responses obtained has been divided by the number of questions asked in each category, so that the columns can be interpreted in relation to each other.
• If the questionnaire contained bullying questions, the sociogram will be coloured based on the information from these questions and another table will be included to show the responses to the bullying questions.
• If the questionnaire contained classification sociometric questions, these results will be shown in a separate table and graph.

 

If you want to see fewer than four categories in the graph, click on the indicator you don't want to see and the program will remove the unwanted indicator from the graph. You can do this with multiple indicators if you only want to see the results of one category at a time.

• The program also creates the frame of the sociogram. The thickness of the lines indicates the strength of the relationships, with red dots representing girls and blue dots representing boys. The dots can be dragged to the desired location using the mouse. If you want to start over, click on the redraw button, if you want to save your work, click the pin button (so that when you return later the program will not reorder the dots back to the original circle but will save your ordering), and if you want to download your work, click on the download button.

You can find help on how to draw the sociogram on the website under the "info" tab.

For the interpretation of the indicators, you may find good support in Ferenc Mérei's (2006) Hidden Network of Communities and in the sociometric standards developed by Ferenc Gebauer (2008), which can be found on the website under the "Document library" tab where you will also find resources to help you interpret bullying and classification sociometric results.

The received data can be converted to PDF or printed on paper with a single click on the print button at the top of the page. The frequency and reciprocity tables are not included in the printout, so if you would like to print or save these as well, you can click on the small icon in the top right corner of the tables to select the entire table and copy it to excel and work with it from there. In the case of larger classes, the graph sometimes slips in the print image, so it is better to save with a screenshot (PrtScr button, then paste the image from the clipboard into Paint or a similar program).

To guarantee privacy, the secret key replaces the names with random codes in the report. Following the development of the program in January 2021, codes are not assigned based on the alphabetic order of the original roster, so it is not possible to retrieve personal information from reports that are locked with the secret key even with the roster in hand.

Tests that have been recorded before the development remained in the system in an anonymised form and are still available to you, however, editing them is no longer possible.

If you have any questions, first read the description under the "info" tab on the eSzocmet website, or if the test does not start after activation, check if any of the following common problems might apply to the test:

• The names are not in the surname - first name format. The system occasionally fails to recognize names or fails to start tests where names contain multiple capital letters following each other or there are no spaces, e.g.: PPeter.
• Names contain special characters.
  The system will not start the test if the names contain any characters other than hyphens and letters of the Hungarian alphabet. In rare cases, a name may contain an apostrophe, which should be omitted and this should be communicated to the children. The following examples are not good: P.Péter, Pél'da Peter, Example Peter1.
  Monograms can contain a dot, number or a special character.
• There is a tab/are tabs in the names.
  The system cannot start tests where a tabulator is listed in the roster. This typically happens when someone copy-pastes the roster from KRÉTA or excel. The method is convenient and works well, but sometimes when selecting a name, a tab is placed in front of the name, which is indicated by a long blank space in front of the name. This can be deleted by clicking backspace before the initial letter of the name, which solves the problem. E.g.: Example Peter
• Your motto is already used by someone else.
  If everything seems to be fine, but the test does not start, change the motto to something else and try again!

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If you still have any problems, post your question here in the group!

By accepting Terms of Use you agree to allow us to use the aggregated data anonymously for our own research for which we thank you!

For more detailed information on research and data security, please visit the website under Frequently Asked Questions or GDPR menu items.

We wish you good luck and good testing! :-)