Instructions for Researchers

Follow this link to a list of questions commonly asked by researchers like yourself: Researcher FAQ

REQUESTING AN ACCOUNT   

You will need a "Principal Investigator" account on the Experiment Management System in order to set up your study. Each person who will conduct experimental sessions will also need to be in the system as a "Researcher" account (including yourself). Thus you will have two accounts, one as a Principal Investigator and one as a researcher, with two separate userIDs.

When you email to request an account, please put the following on a single line, separated by commas:

userID, last name, first name, email address

UserID is the login name you want for the account, not your DePaul ID number - your last name is a good default. Also include a list of any research assistants (undergrads, grad students, etc.) for whom Researcher accounts need to be created. For each researcher, list the same four pieces of information on one line, separated by commas. A good default value for UserID for a Researcher account is the researcher's last name with the numeral "1" appended to it.

Email the Participant Pool Coordinator with this information at depaulpsychexp@yahoo.com

OBTAINING IRB APPROVAL   

Only studies that have received IRB approval may be posted. You will need your IRB approval number to register a study (but you will not need an "experiment number" from the Psychology LRB).

When registering your study in the system, you will be asked to enter your IRB approval code and IRB approval expiration date. You can find this information in the approval memo sent to you by the IRB. If your study was classified by the IRB as exempt there is no expiration date; in that case just select the latest available date on the menu.

Note that studies classified as "exempt" by the IRB are prohibited from including minors as participants.  Under the federal regulations, minors (persons under the age of 18 in Illinois) may not participate in research determined to be exempt. Students who are under the age of 18 may participate in minimal risk/expedited review studies that have received IRB approval to include participants who are under 18. The individual studies must be approved for the recruitment and enrollment of minors by the IRB and must have written into the study plan of work the mechanism for ensuring that parent/guardian permission has been obtained and for obtaining study specific assent from the student, or be eligible for a waiver of these processes. Please consider asking to include students under 18 when you submit your expedited IRB applications in the future so that some studies will be available for Intro Psych students who are under 18.

ADDING YOUR STUDY   

You can add either a lab study or an online study. Online studies can be created within the Experiment Management System using a point-and-click interface, or you can use a study hosted on an external web site (such as Quickdata). After adding your study to the system be sure to make the study "Active". Then click the link to email the administrator and request that the study be made "Visible" to students.

For online studies, be sure participants have the option to leave unanswered any questions they do not want to answer. For studies created within the Experiment Management System, that means that for every question you should select "yes" for "Can students decline to provide an answer for this question?" For studies created in Quickdata, that means that you should not make any questions mandatory.

In your description of the study you should state briefly what tasks participants will do and how long it will take, rounded up to the next half-hour.  You may not, however, say things like "Only 5 minutes for a half-hour of credit!" Any type of competitive advertising for participants in the study descriptions is prohibited.

Credits are awarded in half-hour increments.  So an online study that takes 30 minutes or less should be listed as 0.5 credits and 30 minutes long; between 30 and 60 minutes is 1.0 credits and 60 minutes long; between 60 and 90 minutes is 1.5 credits, etc.  Credit for lab studies is also awarded in half-hour increments, but a 0.5 credit bonus is added for each session if the student arrives on time for the scheduled appointment.  So a lab study that takes 30 minutes or less should be listed as 1.0 credits and the length should be listed in the description as 30 minutes; a study that takes between 30 and 60 minutes should be listed as 1.5 credits and 60 minutes; 60 to 90 minutes is listed as 2.0 credits and 90 minutes, and so on. 

You must also state the age restrictions of your study in the "Eligibility Requirements" section. Students under the age of 18 cannot be enrolled in studies determined to be exempt by the IRB/Office of Research Protections.  If your IRB approval did not specifically authorize the participation of minors, you must say "Must be at least 18 years old." 

Studies that underwent expedited or full IRB review can include participants under 18 if approved by the IRB.  If your study has IRB approval for minors to participate, you should instead state the minimum age for which your study is approved.  If you have permission to enroll subjects as young as 16, for example, you should state "Must be at least 16 years old.  Students under 18 must bring a copy of their signed parental permission form to the study."  (A generic parental permission form is provided to students on the Research Participation web site.)  You must have them show you a copy of the signed form when they arrive so that you can verify they have parental permission, and you must also have an IRB-approved mechanism for obtaining the assent of the student.nbsp;

ADDING TIMESLOTS   

You must add time slots for a lab study so that participants can sign up. You must also do so for online studies, specifying a deadline for participants to complete the study.

Each study has an initial enrollment cap set by the system. If you find that you are unable to add new time slots, it may be because you have reached this cap. Email the coordinator to request an increase in the cap if you need to schedule more subjects.

Remember that all studies must be completed by the last day of regular classes (before finals week). Make sure you do not schedule any signup slots later than that date.

ONLINE STUDY RESTRICTIONS   

Online studies must be made available to only Loop and evening sections (classes with section numbers greater than 400) and online sections. After posting signup slots for at least two weeks, you have two options:

Ask the coordinator to remove the course restriction and make the study available to all sections of Psy 105 and Psy 106 (while keeping the default enrollment cap) or

Ask the coordinator to increase the enrollment cap (while still restricting enrollment to evening/weekend sections). If the enrollment cap is increased, then the course restriction must be kept in place for the entire quarter (meaning the restrictions may not be removed during the final two weeks of the quarter).

Researcher Cancellations and No-Shows:  Researchers must notify participants by at least 5:00 PM the day prior to the appointment if a study is to be canceled. If it is not possible to notify participants by 5pm, the researcher must either get someone to run the study in their place, or post a sign on the door of the study location telling students it has been canceled and instructing them to go to the Psychology Department main office to fill out a form verifying that they were there on time. The researcher must also email the Research Participation Coordinator about the cancellation (depaulpsychexp@yahoo.com)

Students who arrive on time for a study and find that it has been canceled or that the researcher is not there must leave a note for the researcher and stop by the main office to fill out a form to verify that they were there at the time of the appointment. Participants will receive full credit for those studies that are canceled the same day or those for which the researcher does not show, including the 0.5 credit bonus for lab-based studies.

Participant No Shows.  Participants must use the experiment signup web site (depaul.sona-systems.com​) to cancel an appointment – they are not expected to contact the researcher directly. If the student does not cancel the appointment at least one hour in advance, or is more than 5 minutes late, this counts as a "no show" and should be reported in the system.  If a student “no shows" to more than one study, they may not permitted to participate in any further studies and may be required to use “alternative credit papers” to complete the rest of their research participation requirements.  Experimenters must record “no shows” in the research participation web site promptly in order for them to be counted properly.

Cancellation Deadline:  The default cancellation deadline is 1 hour before the scheduled study; that is the latest that students can log into the system and cancel an appointment.  In exceptional cases, researchers may need to set an earlier deadline (such as 24 hours prior to the appointment).  If your cancellation deadline is longer than 1 hour, you must indicate the deadline clearly in the study description so that students will be aware of it when they sign up. 

If your online study data is stored within the Experiment Management System, be sure to download your data as soon as data collection is completed (and no later than the end of the quarter). End-of-quarter maintenance operations will erase all data from online surveys and the prescreening survey - therefore it is essential that you download your data before the end of each quarter.

If you would like to download the prescreen data for all participants in your study, click on your study and then choose “Download Prescreen Responses”. You can then download all the data at once, in CSV (commaseparated) format. 

After each experiment session, log into the Experiment Management System and update the participant records by granting credit to the day's participants, and penalizing any no-shows. If you set "automatic credit granting" to "yes" for your study, then by default credit will be granted once the appointment time has passed and you will only need to go into the system to report no-shows.

For online studies, the automatic credit granting option works a bit differently than you might expect. Rather than granting credit as soon as the participant completes your online survey, the system waits to grant credit until 24 hours after the deadline that you set for completion of the survey, not 24 hours after the student actually completes the survey. If you use automatic credit granting for online studies, therefore, you should set a deadline no more than about a week in the future, and post new slots each week, rather than setting a deadline of the end of the quarter.

If you use an external web site for an online study (such as Quickdata), be aware that automatic credit granting will award credit to anyone who signs up for your study, whether they complete it or not. (This is because the system has no way of knowing whether an external online study was completed or not.) It is better, therefore, to turn off automatic credit granting for externally hosted online studies and instead do the following:

After the user submits their data in your online survey, send them to a separate form in which they will input their identity code. In Quickdata, for example, you can change the "next page" that the user is sent to after they submit their survey answers to be another Quickdata form that will be used to collect the identity codes.

Have the user enter his or her system-assigned identity code in this separate web form. Be sure that you store the identity codes in a separate file or database table (such as a separate Quickdata "form") that is not linked to the survey data.

Use the identity codes to manually grant credit to all the users who completed your survey.

For anyone who signed up for your online study but did not complete it, record them as a "cancellation," since there is no such thing as a "no-show" for an online study.

A demographic survey is administered each quarter during the first two weeks of class. You can restrict enrollment to your studies based on answers to one or more prescreening questions. You can also restrict access based on participation in other studies. Both of these options are available to all researchers within the Experiment Management System.

If you need to include additional screening questions or measures, you should create an online study in the Experiment Management System with the questions you want to include in prescreening.  Be sure you remember to include the option of declining to answer for each question - if you do not, your additional measures cannot be included in prescreening. After creating your online survey, email the Research Participant Coordinator and request that your survey be added to the prescreening survey for the following quarter. Be sure to clearly identify the online survey that you want included. Only surveys that have already been created in the Experiment Management System can be included in prescreening - Quickdata surveys or other external web surveys can not be included.

As for any other study, prior IRB approval is required.  Note that the IRB must specifically approve collecting data through prescreening:  Your IRB protocol must specifically identify the exact questions you plan to include, and must state that you plan to include them in the "Intro Psych Prescreening Survey."  Include a copy of your IRB approval memo when you email us your request to include questions in prescreening.

Researchers should create their surveys for prescreening and contact the Research Participant Coordinator several weeks prior to the start of the quarter, if possible. If a request is received less than two weeks before the beginning of classes, it is unlikely that it can be included.

By default, only the standard demographic survey is carried over to the next quarter's prescreening. If you had a survey included in the previous quarter's prescreening and wish to have it included again this quarter, you must email the coordinator several weeks prior to the start of the quarter. Clearly identify the survey that you want carried over to the next prescreening so that the coordinator knows which section of the prescreening to re-use.

Be sure to download the prescreening data that you need for your research before the quarter ends. At the end of each quarter, all prescreening data may be deleted from the system in preparation for the next quarter's prescreening session.

ELIGIBILITY   

Use of the Intro Psych Subject Pool for data collection is restricted to DePaul Psychology Department faculty, and students working under their supervision.

RECRUITING POLICY   

Direct recruiting of research participants in Intro Psych classes is strictly prohibited. Researchers may not announce their study in class, through emails, handouts, flyers, etc. ALL participant recruiting of Intro Psych students must be done through the online Research Participation System, and no credit, extra credit, or payments may be made to Intro Psych students for research participation except as administered through the Research Participation Pool system.

For routine, administrative, and operational requests and questions, contact the Research Participant Coordinator at: depaulpsychexp@yahoo.com

For questions about Subject Pool policies, contact the Research Participation Pool Manager, David Allbritton. ​