This is step three in our step-by-step guide to setting up a study on Prolific.
Video tutorial
What you can see
Source
Here you can choose whether to recruit a new sample of participants, or use a saved group of participants. For more information please see our full guide to setting up saved Participant groups.
Participants
Here you can state how many participants you wish to complete your study. Please note that for a representative sample study (see 'select participants' below) this number must be between 300 to 2000 (US) or 3000 participants (UK). For other study types, you can recruit as many participants as you wish!
Data collection for your study will continue until it has reached this maximum number of complete submissions. You can only ever have this number of submissions active, awaiting review or approved at any one time, but returned, timed out, and rejected submissions are excluded from this total. You can read more about this here: Submission statuses explained. You are able to pause new sign ups for your study during data collection, if required.
You can increase the number of places on your study after launching it on all studies except representative samples, so feel free to launch to a small number of participants at first and then add more places when you're sure that everything is working smoothly. Please see How do I run a pilot study? for further advice.
In this section you can also state whether participants require login credentials to access your study, and provide these details if relevant.
This feature is typically used by researchers who need participants to log in to a website or app to take part in their study. The login details are provided to the participants in advance so that they can use them to join the study.
You must use this feature if you require participants to sign in to access your study. We do not allow collection of personal information about participants, so you cannot ask participants to use their personal details to sign in.
Credentials
If your chosen tool requires credentials, you will need to provide these within the credentials feature of prolific, please be aware some tools require emails that are verified and this will need to be done before giving them to participants to log in.
Screening
Here you can apply screener sets to your study, if desired. These are saved prescreener question and answer combinations that you can set up as templates.
Location
Here you choose where in the world you would like your participants to be located. Participants were asked the question 'In what country do you currently reside?'. You can choose 'all countries available', USA, UK or see further options by selecting 'more'.
Prolific is only available to participants in certain countries. Please see here for further information: Who are the participants on Prolific?
Study distribution
Here you can choose whether you wish to recruit a representative sample, recruit a balanced sample, apply prescreeners or launch your study to our entire participant pool.
Places on your study will be filled by eligible participants on a first-come, first-served basis. We'll also show you how many participants who meet your criteria have been active on Prolific in the past 90 days. We typically see a 40-50% response rate from eligible participants, however this can vary.
Please see the article Which participants will take my study? for a more detailed look at each of these options.
Representative sample - using this option you can recruit a representative sample of participants in the UK or US.
Quota sample - using this option you can recruit a sample that is balanced across different demographics.
Standard sample - using this option you can launch a study to our entire participant pool, or a selected group of participants using prescreening (see below). Please note that if you choose this option your sample will not be balanced in any way.
Prescreen participants
This is where you can apply your chosen selection of our demographic prescreeners to help you reach your intended audience. Please note that this option is only available for balanced and standard samples.
Can I screen out participants within my study?
No, please do not screen out participants within your studies based on eligibility, or specify screening criteria only within your study title/description. It's very frustrating for participants to get screened out of studies, and our prescreening interface is intended to prevent this! Read more about this here: Can I screen participants within my study?
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