When you know what research question you want to answer and why, it’s time to think about your target population.

When you know what research question you want to answer and why, it’s time to think about your target population. Are they of a specific age? From a certain country? Only women? Or have a certain political attitude? When you’ve decided on the demographic criteria of your target group, you can select it by using Prolific’s pre-screening filters. There are more than 200 pre-screeners available, but if you can’t find one you want, just contact our Support Team and we will do our best to help you out!

Getting a representative sample

Generalizing your findings to a national population can be difficult, especially if your sample doesn’t match the population very well! We offer the technology to support representative sampling on Prolific, and can provide you with representative UK/US samples for your study. With this feature, you will be able to easily collect a sample with strata that reflect the general population in the US or the UK. We also offer a US political sample too.

So what exactly does this mean? Let’s say you want to generalize your findings to the UK population. We will then take your intended sample size and stratify it across three demographics: age, sex, and ethnicity, based on the UK Office of National Statistics data. For example, your sample will have a similar proportion of 30–40 year old Asian women to the general population.

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