Once you've defined your research question and understand why you're running your study, the next step is to identify your target population.
Your target population is the specific group of people you want to learn from. Defining this group carefully helps ensure you recruit the right participants and collect meaningful, reliable data.
Defining your target population
Think about the characteristics that matter for your research. For example, you may want participants who are:
Within a specific age range
From a particular country or region
Of a certain gender
Have particular political views
Meet other demographic or behavioural criteria
Once you've identified the characteristics you need, you can recruit participants using Prolific's pre-screening filters.
Prolific offers 200+ pre-screeners, making it easy to find participants who match your study requirements. If you can't find the filter you need, contact our Support Team using the button at the bottom right of this page.
Recruiting a representative sample
If you want to generalise your findings to a wider population, it's important that your sample reflects that population as closely as possible.
Prolific supports representative sampling for researchers who need a sample that mirrors the general population. We currently offer:
Representative UK samples
Representative US samples
Representative US political samples
How representative sampling works
When you choose a representative UK or US sample, we automatically distribute your requested sample size across key demographic groups so that it reflects the wider population.
For UK and US representative samples, participants are stratified by:
Age
Sex
Ethnicity
These proportions are based on official population data (for example, data from the UK Office for National Statistics for UK samples).
For example, if 30–40-year-old Asian women make up a certain percentage of the UK population, your sample will include a similar proportion of participants from that group.
Representative sampling can help improve the external validity of your research by making it easier to generalise your findings to the broader population.