How to Set Up a Study with Multiple Conditions

Taskflow allows academic researchers to efficiently manage and distribute participants across multiple conditions within a single study on Prolic. This article explains how to set up your study using multiple URLs, or append URLs with unique identifiers, to allocate participants to different conditions effectively.

Step 1: Planning Your Study Conditions

Before creating your study on the Prolific platform, plan the different conditions or tasks you wish to be distributed. Each condition should have a corresponding URL where the specific tasks or surveys will be hosted. This could be different surveys you have created separately or could be the same survey which will allocate participants based on the variations in the URL.

Step 2: Creating Your Study on Prolific

  1. Log in to your Prolific researcher account.
  2. Navigate to 'New Study' and enter your study details.
  3. Under the 'Audience' section, define the demographic characteristics of the participants you want to target.

Step 3: Using Taskflow to Distribute Multiple URLs

  1. In the 'Data Collection' section, select 'Taskflow'
  2. You can then upload a CSV file with your URLs in column A and the number of participants you need for each URL variant in column B.
  3. Taskflow will automatically distribute participants evenly across the different tasks if column B is blank.

Step 4: Appending URLs with Custom Identifiers

Some researchers may wish to add custom identifiers to their URLs that a data collection system can detect and use to allocate participants to specific conditions. This identifier could be a number or any custom text that helps the end system assign participants to the appropriate condition.

  1. Structure Your URLs: Ensure each URL is structured to accept parameters (e.g., https://yoursurvey.com?condition=).
  2. Add Custom Identifiers: Append custom identifiers to each URL that correspond to different conditions in your study (e.g., https://yoursurvey.com?condition=1, https://yoursurvey.com?condition=A etc.).
  3. Configure in Taskflow: In Taskflow, input each custom URL. This allows you to control which participants receive which URL and, consequently, which condition they are assigned to.
    • Example: You might have five different conditions, you would set up URLs like:
      • https://yoursurvey.com?condition=1
      • https://yoursurvey.com?condition=2
      • https://yoursurvey.com?condition=3
      • https://yoursurvey.com?condition=4
      • https://yoursurvey.com?condition=5
  4. Implement in your data collection tool: Ensure that your data collection tool is set up to recognize these custom identifiers and allocate participants accordingly based on the URL parameter.

Launching and Monitoring Your Study

  1. Once all tasks are set and URLs are properly configured, review your study setup.
  2. Click 'Publish Study' to start distributing your conditions to participants.
  3. Navigate to the page for your live study once published and select “See status of URLs”

Here you can see Taskflow provides real-time data on participant completion rates across your different conditions.

Handling Returns

Taskflow ensures that if a participant returns a task, another participant is allocated to that same task. This guarantees that the required number of participants complete each task, ensuring that your entire dataset is annotated as required.

  1. Automatic Reallocation: If a participant returns their task, Taskflow automatically re-allocates that task to another available participant.
  2. Continuous Monitoring: Taskflow continuously monitors task completion rates and re-allocates tasks as needed to maintain the desired number of annotations for each subset of your dataset.

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