Adults via Prolific

How we recruit online participants via prolific

We use Prolific to recruit adult participants online.

For Unsupervised Sessions

Step 1: Login to prolific

Use the lab’s Prolific account to log into https://prolific.ac/. Refer to the Basecamp Lab HQ resource page to find the account and password.

You will be brought to the home page. Note the account balance on the right corner. Be careful and never spend more than that!

Step 2: Create new study

• To create a new study, Click “New Study” on the side bar.

• You will then be asked to fill out some information about the new study:

Usually, we leave the Completion URL and Completion code unchanged. Either of these is used for your online participant to prove that they have completed the study. Usually we paste the Completion code to our programmed study’s “End of Experiment/Thank you” page.

The Study name is the one that your participant will see, so don’t be too explicit about it to prevent them from guessing the purpose of the study.

We paste our study URL into the field Study URL. Note that only the URL of the study on the server is valid, URL of the local-host version is not valid for Prolific. Whether we will need to check the little blue checkbox for “Include url parameter” varies case by case. The most important thing is that you include the participant’s “Prolific ID” somewhere, to match submission to specific subject, either by explicitly asking “What’s your Prolific ID” in the form of a survey question built in to your study, or by checking the “Include url parameter” checkbox and creating a way to extract this information from URL in your data saving process. An example URL could look like this:

http://experiments.childlanglab.com/acqvar-plural-universals/run-exp-v1.html?sid={{%PROLIFIC_PID%}}&condition=1&language=ON

Put in your Estimated Completion Time and just use the automatically calculated Maximum Allowed Time.

Maximum Submission is how many subjects you want to include in this study.

Reward per Participant is the total amount a participant will get when they complete your study. Remember to adjust it in conjunction with Estimated Completion Time so that the $pay/hour on the top of the screen is reasonable.

Step 3: Enter study description

When you finish filling out the information above and click “next”, you will be brought here:

Just briefly describe what your subject will be doing during the experiment.

Step 4: Screen participants

When you click “Next”, you will see this screen:

Usually we will need to do some Custom Prescreening.

Criteria varies across different study, usually what we mind are age group, whether they are native speaker of English, whether they are bilingual/monolingual, where they currently live and etc.

You navigate to the screening criterion you care about in the side bar on the left of the page and click “Apply” when you are done setting up this one criterion.

An example will be like this:

You can Edit/delete a criterion and can also add more.

Step 5 Publish

Click Publish icon and review the details for the last time.

Step 6 Approve your subjects

Once the study is published, people are able to take part in the study. The status of the study will become "Active." When the maximum submission is reached, the status of your study will become "Completed." You should check rather frequently, out of courtesy,(at least once a day) your Active and Completed study and approve the submissions so that participants can get paid.

FAQ

How to Get Demographic data

To export the data on your Prolific study navigate to the submissions view and click "more"->"export".

We will only have access to the prescreening data of filters that we applied to out study before (see Step 4 above)

Where is the data of the online experiment saved?

Usually, we set up the experiment in a way that the data is automatically saved in the server, so don't forget to harvest your data by logging into the server.