Conduct research through this website
If you are a researcher at an academic institution, you can contact us to conduct research through this website.
We can do two things for you:
- Contact potential participants and pay those who completed your study.
- Host your study online.
Possibly, we can also offer technical help and code your study for you. Email us with a brief description of what you want to do at contact@participate-in-research.org.uk.
Anonymity of participants
This website guarantees participants' anonymity towards researchers. The good thing for you is that you do not have to worry about secure data handling and storage, as you will not get participants' names or email addresses in your data.
However, this also means that we do not give out participants' email addresses to you, and neither do we let you use participants' emails or names to tell us who completed the study.
But we do pay participants. To do so, we use 12-digit paricipant identifiers to see who completed the study.
Requirements
Whether you host your study here or elsewhere, the code you use to present
your study and collect questions needs to read in a URL parameter. When we notify participants, we send out URLs that look something like this:
http://participate-in-research.org.uk/studies/study1.html?id=12345The numbers after the "
?id=" bit are the URL parameter containing the ID. You need to
read this from the URL, and submit it along with your answers, so that you can give us a list of these IDs (or we can extract it from your dataset) to pay participants. Get in touch if you need advice on how to do this.
This system also works if you want to host the study elsewhere, as long as you save the ID strings and get them back to us. For example, if you want to host the study on your university server, you would tell us the URL, e.g.
http://smartuniversity.ac.uk/research/study1.htmlWe would append the ID strings to that URL and send them to participants like this
http://smartuniversity.ac.uk/research/study1.html?id=12345and you would again collect the IDs passed in the URL parameter and pass them back to us to pay participants.
If you use other services for creating the questionnaire and collecting the data, you may well still be able to collect data through the panel. For example, SurveyMonkey offers a a system of reading in URL variables, and so does SurveyGizmo.
If you want the study hosted with us, data submission is by writing to a simple plain text file, e.g. in comma separated values (.csv) format. This can be read e.g. into R, Excel or SPSS. If you need a database, you need to contact us to discuss this.
Can I select participants based on certain criteria?
We currently hold minimal demographic information about each partcipant: age, gender, and country of residence. We can select participants to contact based on these characteristics. We also store which studies participants have completed, so you can avoid overlap between studies or contact the same set of participants again.
Is it free?
No. First, you need to pay participants and the PayPal fee (the PayPal fee is small). We also charge a reasonable fee, for our service of maintaining the panel, contacting and paying participants, for hosting your study (if applicable), and for coding your study (if applicable). Get in touch with your requirements for a pricing estimate.
More information
If you are interested, please email us for more information. If possible,
include a short description of the type of study or studies you would like to
do, whether you want them hosted here, and if hosted here, whether you would
provide the study code or would like us to code for you.
contact@participate-in-research.org.uk