‼️ This section is for post-grad students, and others running the surveys on Prolific themselves. If you are an undergrad, your PI or lab manager will work through this with you.

Using Prolific

Go to Prolific and log in with your details

  • Check if there is a project folder 📂 your experiment belongs to under “Projects”.
    • If not, create a new project folder for your study.
  • Consider if your experiment should be desktop only (in most cases we would only want participants to use a desktop)
    • The number of vignettes, whether you show images etc. can all affect this decision.
    • If you allow mobile phone usage, it might be good to compare participant data who use mobile phones to participants who use desktop to ensure no significant differences.
  • Make sure to add the unique link of your experiment (this would be the distribution link Qualtrics gives you) to Prolific
  • Make sure you copy and paste the redirection URL Prolific gives you as a customized end-of-survey message via Survey Flow in Qualtrics.

Collecting Prolific IDs

This is required in order to pay participants

  • Consider how you will collect prolific Id’s (automatic or manual examples on how to do this can be found on the template)
  • If you use URL parameters, make sure the embedded data field that collects the Prolific ID is set up (see template)

Other Considerations

Elimination of participants

  • Consider if you need to eliminate participants from previous studies, especially if this is a replication.
    • Prolific automatically offers this to you if you have duplicated your Prolific draft of the pilot to create the full study.

Participant Payment

  • Calculate how much to pay participants by using the average duration you computed before.
  • Get funding approval from the PI.

🚨Go back to Qualtrics and UPDATE your participant information form with the estimated duration and how much you’ll reimburse participants.🚨

*Consider if you can just automatically approve submissions or if you need to review them. Reviewing submissions manually can help you not waste funds on incomplete etc. trials.

Pre-publishing Checks

  • Check that you have added the correct screeners, number of participants, etc. before pressing publish on Prolific.
  • Preview the survey via Prolific (like we do on Qualtrics) all the way through to the end to ensure:
    • (1) Prolific directs participants to your survey correctly
    • (2) your survey correctly redirects participants back to Prolific

⛳️ After you publish the experiment, go to your lab’s funding tracker page and log on to the details of the amount of funds spent. If you are a student researcher, contact your lab manager / PI for them to log costs on your behalf.