Prolific Academic Survey Alerts

olliebean

Reply from Prolific:

Thank you for letting us know about this. We are in contact with the researcher and monitoring this issue, and assure you that if the researcher is not willing to appropriately compensate participants then we will not be removing the hold on their account.

CheckDigit

I got this nonsense from the researcher for the study " The "Short or Long Game" - Longitudinal Study". I returned the study after spending time on it (based on her instructions) and now she is stating that you only get paid if you returned with a "NO CODE". What does that even mean? There is no such thing as a return with a "NOCODE". Did any of you get paid after returning?

Greetings everyone.

We apologize for those of you who have messaged us without a reply. We have tried to answer each of you individually. More than 700 participants were involved in this survey, so this takes time.

However, we decided to send this collective message to all of you. Unfortunately it seems that there was a misunderstanding in our previous messages. We stated that we would compensate participants who completed the study and participants who returned the study and spent more than 30 minutes working on it.

To be clear: this only concerns people who returned the study by returning a NOCODE. We have compensated every participant who completed the study or returned a NOCODE. This already comprises hundreds of participants. If you have not returned a NOCODE, we have no way of figuring out what time it took you to complete the study.

Prolific's policy is clear: we are not contractually obliged to compensate returned submissions. This is a quote from Prolific's Help Centre webpage: "Returned submissions are excluded from your total number of requested submissions, and you do not have to pay unless you choose to do so". Here is the link to this page if you want to check:

https://researcher-help.prolific.co/hc/en-gb/articles/360009259434-Returned

The same thing applies for timed-out submissions:

https://researcher-help.prolific.co/hc/en-gb/articles/360009392713-Timed-out

To be even clearer:

1) You have been compensated if you have completed the study, or returned the study with a nocode (if you spent more than 30 minutes). We are currently computing bonuses, and will send them as soon as possible.

2) You will not be compensated if you have not completed the study, if you have returned the study without a NOCODE, or if your study was timed-out.

This is the reason we have asked participants to stop completing the study as soon as we figured out there was a problem. This was to avoid too many participants wasting time on a flawed study without being compensated.

As we said, I know this situation is not perfect for a lot of participants. We have tried to do our best, given the magnitude of the server's crash and our limited resources. We have compensated hundreds of participants, so we did take our share of the responsibility.

But please understand the situation. Most of you have struggled through this study, because the study's servers crash. We know your time is precious, and the study was long and tedious. However, we are not responsible for the servers' crash. These things do not happen often, fortunately, but they do happen sometime. Other researchers have faced similar problems. In times of lockdown, there are many more partipants involved in a given study at the same time. Sometimes, this results in the servers crashing. We truly are sorry it happened, but unfortunately we could not control this.

We are contractually obliged to compensate only people who have returned the study with a correct code. And in fact, we have compensated much more participants than what the Prolific policy recommends. We wish we could, but we cannot compensate everyone because of a survey crash that was beyond our control.

This decision is non-negotiable. We thank you in advance for your understanding. We are working our best to avoid these problems in the future. We wish you a nice day.

Best,

allison445

Received the same message which I take to mean they are only paying people who completed it or clicked on I am finished with nocode. Spent about 30 minutes on this and did get a good bit done but knew It would probably time out before completion so returned it 

elsien

I had the same message but I did return the study after half an hour struggling rather than let it time out and I've just checked and I have been paid the £2.50 for it. 

CheckDigit

elsien said:

I had the same message but I did return the study after half an hour struggling rather than let it time out and I've just checked and I have been paid the £2.50 for it. 

I did the same but didn't get paid....

ChaunceyGardiner

elsien said:

I had the same message but I did return the study after half an hour struggling rather than let it time out and I've just checked and I have been paid the £2.50 for it. 

I gave up and returned the study on the advice of the researcher. I spent a good while on it, but I really couldn't say whether it was over 30 minutes. Nevertheless, I received £2.50 today so perhaps I did.

CheckDigit

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Kzedii_2

olliebean said:

Kzedii_2 said:

Fun 4-minute study: Do a task (read text plus a few questions) and do a survey about friends and activities

Did anyone else get the following message for this:

Dear participants, I have now approved everyone who did not fail the attention check. If you are listed as 'awaiting review', then you will not get approval, because you failed the attention check. Currently, Prolific is lagging tremendously, so I will not be able to process any further issues or answer messages. I have contacted Prolific about this, but they write that because of corona a reply may take a while.

I did reply back asking which question i failed but no response so far.

Did you check whether you'd been approved? I got a similar message after doing that study about a week ago, I assume they sent it to all participants. Gave me a few moments of worry before checking that I had indeed been approved.

Yes still showing as awaiting review on mine. 

Marley101

Kzedii_2 said:

olliebean said:

Kzedii_2 said:

Fun 4-minute study: Do a task (read text plus a few questions) and do a survey about friends and activities

Did anyone else get the following message for this:

Dear participants, I have now approved everyone who did not fail the attention check. If you are listed as 'awaiting review', then you will not get approval, because you failed the attention check. Currently, Prolific is lagging tremendously, so I will not be able to process any further issues or answer messages. I have contacted Prolific about this, but they write that because of corona a reply may take a while.

I did reply back asking which question i failed but no response so far.

Did you check whether you'd been approved? I got a similar message after doing that study about a week ago, I assume they sent it to all participants. Gave me a few moments of worry before checking that I had indeed been approved.

Yes still showing as awaiting review on mine. 

I didn't get paid for this one either! Same message - I've emailed the University to complain. It's annoying as Ive had very, very few studies in the last month. Used to be good but now number of studies i get has dropped off a cliff

CheckDigit

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