This is step one in our step-by-step guide to setting up a study on Prolific.
Video tutorial
What you'll see
What is the title of your study?
Here, you can give your study a title, which will be visible to participants. If you're running multiple duplicate studies, we would recommend giving them all unique names (e.g. 'Personality Study 1', 'Personality Study 2' etc.) to make it easier for you to identify individual studies later on, or specifying a unique internal name (see below).
Please note: you cannot use the word 'Prolific' in your study name.
Give your study an internal name (only visible to you)
This allows you to give your study a private, internal name which is only visible from your Researcher account and to the Prolific Support Team. This may be useful if your studies are targeting specific demographic groups, but you don't wish to reveal those groups to your participants (e.g. 'Experiment - control', 'Experiment - condition one' etc.).
Describe what participants will be doing in this study
This is your chance to tell participants about your study. You should include any key information here that will help participants to decide if they wish to participate. We recommend keeping this relatively short and to the point to help participants get the information they need, and then further essential details should be included in your consent form within the study.
As a starting point, you may wish to include:
- The aim of the study.
- What the participant will be required to do.
- A study label which will be displayed to participants on their study preview.
- Any sensitive information participants will have to provide. You can add a study content warning.
- Anything you think the participant might be uncomfortable doing.
- Anything unusual the participant might have to do, such as downloading software or requiring headphones.
- Anything the participant must do to avoid their submission being rejected.
- An estimate of how long it will take to receive a reward after submission.
- If you plan to use bonus payments, or if it’s a longitudinal study with a payment schedule, then state this clearly.
Please note that you cannot screen participants within your study description. Further information on this can be found in the article: Can I screen participants within my survey?
While writing the study description, you may also want to consider how you will debrief the participants.
Restricting by device and additional software requirements
If you want to restrict participation to certain devices, you can indicate that only desktop, mobile, or tablet devices are allowed. Here you can also specify if your study requires audio, a camera, a microphone, or software downloads.
Participants will see this information before they choose to take part in your study, allowing them to make an informed choice as to whether they'd like to participate.
Please note
This is merely used as an indicator for participants and that these options do not screen out participants based on the device options you select. It's important to state any specific compatibility restrictions clearly in your study description if certain devices/browsers are not compatible
If you indicate specific device compatibility for your study on Prolific (e.g. desktop-only) and state this requirement in your study description, submissions from participants who take part using an unsupported device do not require approval. Please see here for more details.
If you'd like to ensure participants only use a certain type of device (e.g. desktop), some survey software allows you to restrict participation in this way. For instance, Qualtrics offers this functionality, and can be set up using display logic and restricting to device type. Gorilla also support restriction of studies to specific device types.
Previous step: Setting up a study on Prolific
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