Help with prescreening

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1

Hi everyone,

I am new here and want to create a survey about ‘‘Cycling experiment’’. I want the sample to include only people who are able to cycle. How do I do that? Can I introduce prescreening?

Many thanks.

2

Dear Farad

Welcome to the forum :slight_smile:

There is a lacuna in prescreeners for cyclists. As a keen cyclists, I think this is a shame. The only prescreeners I can find (they are searchable) are participation in Team sports> cycling, and Watching Sports > Cycling which is probably not what you are looking for. So alas, you would need to

  1. Ask Prolific to add a new prescreener for “Do you ride a bicycle” or (non-team) Sports you Participate in. It seems strange to me that there are only prescreeners for team sports and not individual ones. Strange or not, I think this would take a quite a long time even if your suggestion were accepted. There is also a thread where there are calls to suggest and vote for new prescreeners from time to time (but not at the current time) here Vote For New Screeners to which I have now added the suggestion to include a prescreener for non-team sports.
  2. Prescreen yourself. asking just prolific ID and “Do/Can you ride a bicycle?” paying about .20 UKP for about n x 1.5 to 2 (where n is the number of participants you want and the multiplier is there since not everyone who answers your prescreener will come back). Then use the IDs you have collected in your prescreening study in a “custom screener >custom allowlist”. or
  3. Less likely use the participants who are team cyclists (a very keen small subset of cyclists)
  4. Even less likely invite that those who watch cycling, asking them if they are cyclists, which a high proportion are likely to be imho but again, they may be in a fringe subset.
  5. Since most adults can ride a bike, invite everyone in the demographic you are interested in, include a question “Can you ride a bicycle” and don’t use the data from those participants. It is against the rules to screen participants during (and ejecting them, without payment, from) studies. Apparently about 35% of Americans for instance can’t ride a bike according to Larry English here.

Number 2 is the standard way of approaching the situation where there is no prescreener for the participant group you want to study but it will add a couple of days and (bearing in mind that most participants will be able to cycle) about .4 UKP per participant to cost. That made me think of 5 above.

I am sorry I can’t be of more help

Tim

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