Hi, I brought this up on the “Ask Anything Thread” but am posting here too at the request of @Josh, as it’s more of a feature request:
In the demographic data download, would it be possible to add a column to the export that lets us know how recently the information was updated by the participant in question? That way, we’ll have an idea of how up-to-date the demographic information is (particularly important for things like student/employment status), and can account for that in our analyses.
Great idea! Love it. I was also wondering if that would somehow be possible to know.
Sometimes the demographics are also outdated and shown as such in the download.
So related to Gillian’s question, may I ask or suggest to have Prolific ask participants to update their demographic questions, perhaps once a year or so?
And would it be possible for Prolific without causing people much trouble or it somehow being trouble for Prolific to ask participants to fill out at least some certain demographic info?
There are a few dempograpchics that almost every researcher collects and it would be much simpler if participants answered these questions once on Prolific and researchers could rely on the Prolific data instead of having to collect it again themselves. That’d reduce study time, too. That’s perhaps not great for participants but for all researchers it certainly is.
The most important demographic info usually is gender (or sex), age, highest education completed, personal and household income, and quite often additionally researchers would collect marital status and ethnicity but I think the latter two are not as important.
Edit: I also just thought of another benefit for participants. If these demographic info are available for everyone on Prolific, some participants who didn’t provide this info might be excluded by prescreeners so having this info on Prolific might enable some more participants to be eligible for studies.
