Hello! Looking for an answer to a question about a complex survey I am helping run.
Firstly, this survey involves a specific criteria of individuals that Prolific’s built-in pre-screeners can find, to an extent, aside from one criteria. I understand the help page in describing that we can set an approve ID list for a second study for those who meet all criteria, and pay everyone from the first question set that asks our pre-screener questions.
However, because our study is complex in that it involves meeting virtually and various study time points, we are wondering whether Prolific allows study participants from this site to contact us if they are further interested in participating in our study. I.e., we would pay participants for our initial set of questions here, not collect any of their identifying info (as I know that’s not allowed), but if they would like to continue to the full study that we would also compensate for, they would reach out to us by email.
I am reaching out for support because I do not know whether Prolific allows researchers to continue studies off of the site. Again: we would not be collecting identifying info from the participants, and we would pay everyone for the short questionnaire we do host on this site; however, due to the complexity of our research that does involve face-to-face interviews, we want to confirm that participants can reach out to our contact information to continue our study.
Thank you for anyone who knows any information on this!
Hello Grad Student
Welcome to the forum 
I am afraid that email addresses are considered personal information so you not to ask them according to Prolific’s TOS:
However you can contact them via email using
ProlificID@email.prolific.co
and they can contact you via the messaging system.
In a study of this type you can contact participants using the above email and meet them virtually. Here is the FAQ giving the recommended what that be done
I hope that the Prolific email address will be okay for you.
Tim
Hello! Thank you for the reply, but I’m afraid this doesn’t really answer my question. We would need to continue our study off of Prolific, and I did state that we would not collect emails from participants. I am wondering if we can state in our initial survey that if they would like to continue our survey and be compensated more, that they can reach out to us by email. But because we are not continuing the study on Prolific after the initial screener, I am not sure whether this is allowed.
Dear Grad Student
I am sorry I failed to answer your questions.
I am wondering if we can state in our initial survey that if they would like to continue our survey and be compensated more, that they can reach out to us by email.
I meant to say that you are not allowed, according to the Prolific rules, to ask for email addressses.
By the way, often, or indeed usually, participants will not have time to read detailed instructions before pressing participate because there is such a rush to be included.
Collecting email addresses is not allowed, but scheduling and holding virtual meetings, contacting participants using their Prolific email address,
ProlificID@email.prolific.co
is fine as addressed in the second of the two FAQs that I mentioned above.
It seems to me that I am saying the same thing, so I am sorry if I have failed to respond to your question again m(._.)m
Sincerely,
Tim
I think a little more detail on what you mean by continue the survey would be useful. Are you talking about just having an optional follow-up for participants?
At least for us, we do this via Prolific, so they indicate if they’d be willing to do a follow-up via a yes/no type of question, and if so, we add their IDs to the allowlist for a separate Prolific study which contains the follow-up.
EDIT: For reference, this is what Prolific calls a longitudinal study: How do I set up a longitudinal / multi-part study? – Prolific