Hello everyone, I have a question to ask. I want to recruit Chinese language learners who are native English speakers as my participants. How should I choose them? Should I select “English” as their first language and “Chinese” as fluent in the language options? However, this way, I cannot be sure if they are actually Chinese learners or if they may have learned Chinese from their parents who live in the UK but are of Chinese descent rather than through formal education. If you have any good suggestions, please let me know. Thank you very much.
Hi again Quan
I am afraid that there is no existing screener for Chinese learners. You can screen for “What do you study?” “Languages” but that is the closest and even if you screened for first language, English, and Fluent languages Chinese, as well as studying languages, then as you say you may get people who know Chinese from their parents and are studying not Chinese but French or whatever.
So I think you will have to prescreen yourself. There is advice on how to do this here
Alternatively, you can ask that only people who are studying Chinese take your study, but you are not allowed, according to the TOS to screen people out of your study so if NON learners of Chinese take your study then they are within their rights are should be payed.
I am glad to see that you seem to have sorted out your payment issue (or perhaps I presume too much).
Tim
Thank you for your answer.
I still have another related question. For example, if I choose English as “first language” and Chinese as “fluent language”, this means that the participant is bilingual？
However, when I select “bilingual” option（native language + one other language）, the number of eligible participants decreases, I want to know what the reason is？
and I also want to know, if I choose Chinese learners whose native language is English, do I need to set the bilingual option? or I just need to choose first language “English” plus with fluent language “Chinese”?
Looking forward to your answer, thank you very much.
I still have another related question. For example, if I choose English as “first language” and Chinese as “fluent language”, this means that the participant is bilingual ？
I am not sure. I think that some people may say that they are fluent in a language without asserting that they are bilingual. Fluent means, basically, very good. But bilingual means that one is approximately equally good in both languages.
However, when I select “bilingual” option（native language + one other language）, the number of eligible participants decreases , I want to know what the reason is？
The reason may be simply that someone people have not responded to both questions either because they did not answer that “About you” question in the first place, or because their answer is sort of past its sell-by date. By this I mean, I think that Prolific makes answers to questions void after a certain amount of time (and for that reason, Participants are asked to answer the same questions again) depending on the question.
and I also want to know, if I choose Chinese learners whose native language is English, do I need to set the bilingual option? or I just need to choose first language “English” plus with fluent language “Chinese”?
As I responded above, I think that if you choose first language is English and fluent in Chinese then you are going to get participants who are not “learners” but as you guessed, people whose parents are Chinese but live in an English speaking country.
Further, if you choose “bilingual” then you are MORE likely to find these people with Chinese speaking parents, because few English speaking Chinese learners reach “bilingual” level in their Chinese.
So, alas, I think you need to prescreen. And that will cost quite a lot of money since even if you choose those that study “languages” only a small minority will be Chinese learners.
Another option is to ask Prolific (support, I guess, or perhaps on these forums) to add a screener “What languages do you learn?”
Tim