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Seeking advice on running a web-based study on groups

  • 1.  Seeking advice on running a web-based study on groups

    Posted 06-03-2020 01:00
    ** Apologies for cross-postings **

    Dear all,

    I am seeking your advice on running a web-based study on groups, including how to recruit research participants and how to have people join a study on time. My goal is to run an online experiment on groups using Zoom (or any equivalent web-based meeting software). Specifically, I need four participants to join a Zoom meeting at the same time.

    So far I have tried three online recruitment sites - Upwork, Prolific, and Amazon Mturk - but failed. Let me give you some examples on how my attempts failed.

    1. Upwork: Upwork doesn't allow me to include external links (e.g., Zoom meeting link, signupgenius.com link) in my job post, due to the concern that I may pay participants outside of Upwork. Thus, I have to receive proposals from interested workers individually and coordinate availability among interested workers so that I can have four people in each session. This process was very slow. Moreover, most of the workers in Upwork are engineers/software developers, and are not interested in participating in a research which pays $10/hour.

    2. Prolific: In Prolific, to post a study, a researcher should include one study URL (which is a link to Qualtrics/SurveyMonkey for most studies). Once participants click "start" participation, they are re-directed to this URL. Also Prolific automatically sets a timer on studies -- once interested participants click your research post, they have to complete their participation shortly. Due to this timer system, I couldn't include a Zoom meeting link as the study URL, because the Zoom meeting doesn't start when interested people click my research post. I instead included a link to an online sign-up page, but it failed too. This is because in Prolific, once the number of people who "started" (but not completed) your study is larger than the number of your target participants, your study becomes unavailable to other participants. Because not all people who clicked my study post actually signed up, my study became unavailable to other participants even when the slots were not filled. Moreover, even when four people signed up for a session, at least one of them failed to join the study on time, and thus the session was canceled.

    If you have done a web-based study on groups, could you share your experience or share any resources that you have found helpful? For example, where did you recruit research participants? How did you ensure participants to join the study on time?

    Any advice will be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your consideration.

    Sincerely,
    Tae Jin Hwang
    Washington University in St. Louis

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    Tae Jin Hwang
    Washington University in St. Louis
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