We know that sometimes, you cannot find the screeners you need to recruit the right audience for your study. That’s why we are currently trialling a feature which will allow you to create your own questions to screen participants, in addition to those already available on Prolific.
The trial will available until this Friday (13/08). You can submit a custom screening request by selecting ‘Create custom screener’ in the audience section of the study form and following the steps.
A quick question about the custom screener. Does the recruitment process only involve inviting participants who are already part of the platform? Or will you reach out to people, who match the criteria a researcher chooses, from outside the platform (Particularly in the worst-case scenario: the researcher could not find enough participants from the existing sample pool)?
This experiment only involves inviting participants who are already on Prolific.
In the process of assessing the feasibility of the custom screeners requested, we will inevitably find out some that we cannot serve due to:
not having specific participants represented in the Prolific pool at all or
not having specific participants in sufficient numbers
Either way, we let the researcher know that we cannot serve their request and take the requested criteria into account when considering a strategy to grow our participant pool.
Note that for this trial, we do an initial assessment of the custom screener before offering it to the researcher in order to avoid the scenario you describe of not having any/enough participants to serve the researcher’s need and risking to waste considerable amount of money in the process.
Dear Lucie, That actually sounds like something I might need soon - can you provide a rough estimate of how much one would need to pay for an extra screening question?
