Week 7 | Introducing Prolific

This week, I made some final touches in preparation for running the experiment. No major changes but I thought I’d update you guys:

1. Added 2 Demographic Questions About Age And Gender
2. Included Group Size Of 5 Participants At The Beginning Of The Instructions
3. Checked Instructions For Grammar Issues
4. Replaced 2 Minute Limitation With Whenever Participant Submits Survey

I sent my final version to Dr. Wang to look over one last time, but I anticipate being able to run my experiment in the coming days!

Prolific

To do so, I will be using Prolific, which makes it super easy to distribute surveys to users around the world. I spent some time exploring its interface, and it’s really convenient—you can set parameters for which participants you want to recruit and you can pay participants after the conclusion of the study.

I will have to create a name for my study and write a description so users on Prolific can see the experiment. I can also internally name the study which is really useful.

I then get to insert the link to my Google Form so participants can access the survey. There’s also a bunch of cool features that allow me to record Prolific IDs and track when a participant has finished.

Here I can choose how many participants I want, where I’m getting my sample, and how I want that sample to be distributed.

And lastly I can choose how much to pay participants based on an hourly wage and estimated duration of completion.

I did a few test runs with the survey, and 4 minutes seems enough to read through the instructions and answer all the items. I did a cost estimate using 4 minutes for estimated time of completion, $12.00/hr, and 105 recruited participants (35 for each study). It should be about $84 for participant fees plus some service fees to Prolific. Then for the experiment itself, the most that it would cost is $126. This is assuming none of the banks fail and all participants keep their tokens in the public account. That would be highly unlikely, so $126 is our upper bound.

Hopefully, I can launch the experiment next week and get some results!

Until next time,
Cindy