README.md

Impact of badges as a gamification element on user engagement in StackOverflow

Follow the steps below to replicate the study. The preprocessing results are available here.

Data retrieval

• Run the queries from queries.sql in Google BigQuery.
  • Direct links to shared queries: Badges, Comments, Posts
• Download the results by clicking on SAVE RESULTS and
  • for Badges select CSV (local file)
  • for Comments and Posts select CSV (Google Drive), wait for the transfer to complete and download from there
• Rename the files to badges.csv, comments.csv and posts.csv and place them into a directory data next to preprocessing.py.

Preprocessing

• Use python>=3.7
• Install required packages with python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
• Execute python preprocessing.py

Analysis

• Create a directory results
• Open analysis.Rmd and run all chunks (t-test results and plots will be saved to ./results)