Information for Researchers who wish to use the Introductory Psychology Research Participation Pool (Subject Pool)
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). Each user can have a single account with multiple roles, so if you have an existing account as a PI, researcher, participant or instructor you can simply email the coordinator and ask to have another role added to your existing account. If you do not have an account, go to the Experiment Management System web site and create a participant account by clicking on "Campus Connect Log In" and following the prompts. Then email the coordinator to have your role changed to PI or Researcher or both. If you are unable to create a student account first, you can ask the coordinator to create the researcher account for you instead.
When you email the coordinator about setting up "Researcher" or "PI" accounts, please provide the following:
name, .depaul.edu email address, tenure track faculty sponsor
You must indicate who the faculty sponsor or faculty co-investigator is for the project. This must be a tenure-track or full-time faculty member in the Psychology Department, and you must cc the faculty sponsor when you email to request creation of your account, or when you request reactivation of your account. (Accounts are deactivated each year and you must email the coordinator to have your account reactivated.)
Email the Participant Pool Coordinator with this information at
psychexperiments@depaul.edu If you do not receive a response within 2 days, please email the Research Participation Pool Manager, David Allbritton.
When you log in to your Sona account, always use the "Campus Connect Log In" button. If that does not work, contact the coordinator.
OBTAINING IRB APPROVAL
Only studies that have received IRB approval may be posted. You will need your IRB approval number to register a study. The IRB will want you to describe how you will award credit to participants - see the sections below labeled "UPDATING CREDIT AND NO-SHOW RECORDS FOR LAB STUDIES" and "CONFIGURING ONLINE STUDIES TO GRANT CREDIT."
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 website (such as Qualtrics). Almost all researchers use Qualtrics or some other external (external to Sona Systems) survey site, so be sure to choose "Online Exernal Study" as the study type and NOT "Online Survey Study." 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 Approved. Once the study is Approved and Active, participants will be able to see signup slots that you post for it.
For online studies, be sure participants have the option to leave unanswered any questions they do not want to answer unless you have IRB approval to require that all questions be answered (See the LRB FAQ). If you do allow them to leave a question unanswered, the best approach is to make answering each question mandatory before submitting the survey, but include "I prefer not to answer" as an answer option.
You must include in your study abstract "Faculty sponsor: [name of full-time faculty member]" as the first thing in the abstract. (It must be visible in the list of studies, before any description of the study.) Optionally in your "Study Abstract" or "Detailed Description" you may also state briefly what tasks participants will do. You should not say anything about how long the study will take in the abstract or description; there is a "duration" field that already has this information. The duration must be a multiple of 30 minutes, and you may not say things like "Only 5 minutes for a half-hour of credit!" anywhere in your description. Any type of competitive advertising for participants in the study descriptions is prohibited. Please do not put special characters in your study name like "!!!@@@ My study comes first in the list alphabetically." Studies are displayed to participants in random order, so that does not work anyway.
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 duration; between 30 and 60 minutes is 1.0 credits and 60 minutes duration; 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 duration should be "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. Participants can just assume that a "30 minute" duration study will take 30 minutes or less, etc.
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 website.) 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.
Occasionally studies have received IRB approval to include “attention check” questions that must be answered correctly to get credit for participation. If you have such a study, please mention it in your email when you ask us to approve it and allocate hours. If a subject is denied credit for missing an attention check question, update their timeslot to “No show - Unexcused” and put “failed attention check” or something similar in the “comments” box. That will help us distinguish such cases from instances of equipment failure, etc. that we should grant credit for. You should also make sure that when credit is denied for failing the attention check the participant is redirected by Qualtrics (or whatever software you are using) to a page that clearly explains that they did not get credit and why. If you are instead denying credit manually in Sona Systems, then at the time you deny credit you should also email the participant (using the "contact" button in the View/Administer Timeslots screen) telling them that they were denied credit and why. Your email should also include the name of the study, the name of the researcher, and the name of the faculty sponsor.
ADDING TIME SLOTS
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. Please set a deadline no more than a week or two in the future (rather than at the end of the quarter), and post additional time slots as neeeded.
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. How many we are able to give you will depend on supply and demand each quarter.
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 should be made available to only Loop and evening sections (classes with section numbers greater than 400) and online sections for the first week or two, so that those students who can not do lab studies have a chance to sign up. After a week or two you can remove the course restriction and make the study available to all sections of PSY 105 and PSY 106. In some cases the first few weeks of the quarter may also be reserved for only lab-based signups. Researchers conducting online studies are advised to have an alternative source of subjects (such as MTurk) as a backup and to include it in their IRB proposals, in case there is a shortage of subjects.
CANCELLATIONS AND "NO-SHOWS"
Researcher Cancellations and No-Shows: Researchers must notify participants by at least 5:00 p.m. the day prior to the appointment if a study is to be canceled. If it is not possible to notify participants by 5 p.m., 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 (
psychexperiments@depaul.edu).
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 website (
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 website promptly in order for them to be counted properly. Please do not report an unexcused "no-show" for an online study! Only for lab studies. Anyone who signed up for your online study but did not complete it should be recorded as a "cancellation," since there is no such thing as a "no-show" for an online study.
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.
DOWNLOADING YOUR DATA
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.
DEMOGRAPHIC DATA
If you need to report demographic characteristics of your study participants you can use their prescreen survey responses. 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 (comma separated) format. After you extract the demographic data that you need please delete the prescreen data file (even though it does not contain any names). You must download the prescreening data before the end of the quarter or it will no longer be available.
UPDATING CREDIT AND NO-SHOW RECORDS FOR LAB STUDIES
After each lab-based 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. Note that you will need to record participants' Sona Systems anonymous ID codes when they come to the lab so that you can grant them credit later!
CONFIGURING ONLINE STUDIES TO GRANT CREDIT
For online studies on external web sites (such as Qualtrics), you must do one of the following: (Method B is strongly preferred)
- Method A. (Discouraged) 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 Qualtrics, for example, you can change the "next page" that the user is sent to after they submit their survey answers to be another Qualtrics form that will be used to collect the identity codes. Have the user enter his or her system-assigned identity code in this separate, second, Qualtrics form that is not linked to the survey containing your research data. The second Qualtrics form must be restricted so that it can only be accessed from the link in your primary survey page (for instructions, do a web search for the words "Qualtrics Restricting What Website a Respondent Comes From"). Use the identity codes to manually grant credit to all the users who completed your survey. If you use this method, we will have to verify it is configured correctly in Qualtrics before you are allowed to post signups. Expect this to take an additional 1 to 4 weeks.
[Note: The identity codes are always 5 digit numbers. If you place a restriction or validation check on the code students enter to make sure it is a 5 digit number, that may prevent students from mistakenly using their DePaul ID number instead.]
- Method B. (Strongly preferred) Use the External Study Auto Credit Granting function of the Experiment Management System in the "Study URL" section when setting up the study. It can be a little complicated to set up initially, but simple instructions for Qualtrics exist on the Sona Systems Help Pages. (There is also a video tutorial if you prefer.) Do only steps 1 and 3 (setting up the correct URL in Sona Systems and in Qualtrics) and it should work. Skip step 2 (changing your survey flow fields in Qualtrics to include an "id" field) UNLESS you need to record the subjects' Sona Systems identity codes in your data to match up with prescreening or other data later. Skipping step 2 will omit the identity codes from your data file when you download it. To prevent the identity codes from being recovered later in Qualtrics, you must also delete all the responses in Qualtrics for that survey after you download your data. This is the preferred method for granting credit for Qualtrics studies, and is the most secure and easiest to maintain once you set it up.
There are also detailed instructions for automatic credit granting that may be useful if you are using something other than Qualtrics.
After you set up automatic credit granting you must test it before posting for signups. Here are the steps:
- In your Sona Systems researcher account, choose "change study information" and add an "Invitation Code" (password) to make sure no real participants can sign up
- Add a timeslot
- Log out of Sona Systems and log back in as a "Participant"
- Sign up for your study and go through it all the way to the end
- At the home screen of your Sona Systems participant account, click on "View other Credits I've earned"
- Make sure the study you just tested resulted in credit being awarded. Look for "Credits granted on ..." and today's date.
- While logged in to your researcher role in Sona, go to the "View/administer timeslots" panel for your study and make sure that everyone who completed the study has "Credit Granted" and NOT "Awaiting Action." If someone completed the study but it still says "Awaiting Action" for them, then your configuration is wrong and you must fix it.
- If credit was not awarded, review the instructions, fix the problem and try again.
Alternative testing method: You can follow the instructions on the Sona Systems help pages for "Testing External Study Credit Granting Integration" and it that is successful you can then post a timeslot for ONE subject. After one subject has participated and you have verified that they were correctly awarded credit (it says "Credit Granted" and NOT "Awaiting action"), you can then post the rest of your timeslots. But PLEASE be sure it is working correctly before you post more than one or two timeslots!
PRESCREENING
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. [Note: If you simply need to restrict enrollment based on whether the prescreening survey was completed, the final question on the prescreening survey can be used for this purpose. It just asks "Did you complete this survey?"] 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. Call your survey something like "2014 Fall prescreening items for (your name here)."
After creating your online survey in the Sona Systems web site, 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 - Qualtrics surveys or other external Web surveys can not be included. Also please indicate how you will use the questions to restrict access to a study.
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.
The Prescreening survey generally should NOT be used to simply collect survey data; Prescreening is for questions that will be used to restrict participation in a study to certain groups based on their answers to Prescreening questions. In your email to the Coordinator please include a description of how your prescreening questions will be used to select participants and for which study. If your questions are not being used to select participants for a study this quarter, they probably can not be included in Prescreening - use a stand-alone survey as a separate study instead. Exceptions will need to be approved by the Subject Pool Manager. When deciding which measures to include in the Prescreening survey, we will apply the following priorities:
- The total length of the Prescreening Survey should be 30 minutes or less, including the department's demographic questions and all researcher-submitted questions.
- Small sets of questions (1 to 5) that will be used to restrict who can sign up for a study will receive the highest priority.
- Standard published scales that will be used to restrict who can sign up for a study will also be included if there is room.
- If the Prescreening Survey is still under 30 minutes long, short (less than 5 minute) surveys that are simply for data collection may be included.
- Requests received less than one week before the beginning of classes may be too late for consideration if the Prescreening Survey is already full. Two or three weeks before classes begin is a safer margin.
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 request it. 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 when the Psychology Subject Pool is operating (currently fall, winter and spring quarters). 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. Other psychology classes that offer credit for research participation should also use the Sona Systems web site for recruitment and signups.
Applicability: All sections of Psy 105 and Psy 106 during the fall, winter, and spring quarters, including online and evening sessions. Other psychology courses that offer students credit for research participation during the fall, winter, and spring quarters. The subject pool does not operate (and the research participation requirement does not apply) for summer or intersession classes.
CONTACTS
For routine, administrative, and operational requests and questions, contact the Research Participant Coordinator at:
psychexperiments@depaul.edu
For questions about Subject Pool policies, or if the Coordinator has not responded to your email within 2 days, contact the Research Participation Pool Manager, David Allbritton.