This is step three in our step-by-step guide to setting up a study on Prolific.

Contents:
1. Source
2. Participants
3. Credentials
4. Screening
5. Location
6. Study distribution
7. Prescreen participants
8. Submissions
9. Reject exceptionally fast submissions

Source

Selecting your participant source

When setting up a study on Prolific, you have several options for finding participants:

  • Find new participants on Prolific: Access our general participant pool for your research needs
  • Find AI Taskers on Prolific [Private beta]: Choose from a curated group of AI Taskers, specifically selected for training and evaluating AI models
  • Find Domain Experts on Prolific [Premium]: Access premium participants with verified expertise in specific domains, ensuring the highest accuracy and quality for your study
  • Use saved groups of participants: Utilize previously saved participant groups for consistent sampling across multiple studies

Participants

Participant recruitment

Here is where you’ll specify how many participants you need for your study.

Guidelines & best practices

Determining participant count: For most studies (except representative samples), you can increase participant numbers after launch. Consider starting with a small sample to verify everything works properly before recruiting more participants. See our guide on running pilot studies.

Representative samples: If you’re looking to recruit representative samples, you must recruit between 300-2000 participants (US) or up to 3000 (UK). For all other study types, there's no participant limit.

Study completion parameters: Your study will remain open until it’s reached the specified participant count you’ve entered. Only active, awaiting review, or approved submissions count toward this total. Learn about submission statuses or how to pause recruitment if needed.

Credentials

If your study requires participants to log in, you must provide login credentials here. These details will be shared with participants before they begin. Personal login information cannot be requested from participants as we don't allow collection of personal information.

When entering your credentials you’ll need keep the following criteria in mind:

  • Separate each related username and password with a comma
  • No commas in passwords
  • Add 10% more credentials than participants required
  • On initial set up, the current credentials limit is 500, but you can add more once your study is active

Screening

Screeners help you refine your participant search. You have two options:

  • Choose new screeners: Manually select from our prebuilt screeners found under the location and prescreen sections
  • Apply a screener set: Use a saved template of commonly used prescreeners

Screener sets are templates of your frequently used prescreeners. They streamline your study setup process when you regularly combine multiple prescreeners.

For example, if you often recruit right-handed, bilingual, 30-year-olds, you can create a screener set with these criteria instead of manually selecting the 'Handedness', 'Bilingual', and 'Age' screeners for each new study. For detailed instructions on creating screener sets, check out our ‘Screener sets' article.

Location

Here you'll select where your participants will be located. You can choose from our most common options:

  • All countries
  • 🇬🇧 UK
  • 🇺🇸 USA

Or, if you’re looking for participants from other specific countries, select 'All countries' and then either search or browse through our list. Countries are organized by popularity first, then alphabetically.

Study distribution

Here is where you decide how you'd like your study distributed:

Standard sample: This will be distributed to all available participants

Quota sample: This will add a balanced sample on Sex, distributing the study evenly to male and female participants

Representative sample: This will be distributed to participants based on the UK or USA census data. Check out our 'Representative sample' article for detailed instructions on this feature, including our data sources, limitations, and cost considerations.

Prescreen participants

This is where you can apply our demographic prescreeners to target your intended audience. For example, if you need right-handed, bilingual, 30-year-olds for your study, you can select these specific criteria to refine your participant pool.

✋ Please note that this option is only available for balanced and standard samples.

Can I screen out participants within my study?

We kindly ask that you don’t screen participants within your studies based on eligibility criteria. Additionally, please don't specify screening criteria only in your study title or description. This approach can create a frustrating experience for participants, and our prescreening interface is specifically designed to help you target the right participants from the start. For more information, please see: Can I screen participants within my study?

Submissions

Here, you select how many times a participant can complete your study. You can choose either:

  • Once
  • Multiple, and then input the maximum number of times they can complete your study

Examples where multiple submissions are beneficial:

Recurring consumer behaviors: "What did you order from Deliveroo this week?" — A participant who ordered delivery 5 times that week could submit multiple entries, providing valuable data about different purchasing decisions.

Reject exceptionally fast submissions

Prolific can automatically reject exceptionally fast submissions that fall significantly below your estimated completion time to prevent low quality submissions. Check out Bulk rejecting exceptionally fast submissions more detail on how this feature works, and managing these submissions.

Next step: Study cost

Previous step: Data collection

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