Participants booted before finishing? (not a timeout issue)

đź’ˇ Prolific Hub
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I’ve run quite a number of studies on Prolific, but today I had 2 out of 50 participants send messages indicating that “there were questions missing” or “it has taken me out of the question section”. One elaborated saying that they got bumped back to the Prolific website where the only option was to end the survey before they had completed the questions. They weren’t timeouts; both participants showed up in the dashboard as NOCODE, and in Qualtrics as the only two “responses in progress” (participants with surveys started but not completed).

I paid both as both seemed to have gotten as far as they could in good faith but I was just wondering if anyone else has run into this? Theoretically this could be an issue with my survey, but I’ve never seen this specific technical issue before, including when running a previous survey nearly identical to this one, so I’m wondering if it’s a bug. I am planning on running a version of this with many more participants soon and if 4% of them get booted early that will be a non-negligible number, so if there’s anything I can do about this or if anyone else has experienced this recently it would be interesting to hear about.

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Hi @Gabe , I’ve had one similar-ish issue with a study using PsychoPy (PsychoJS on Pavlovia). Here’s a post I made about it on the forum. For this one, it seemed like asking people to check their internet connection reduced the number of messages we received about errors.

I would start by double checking the condition/branching logic and flow in the qualtrics to make sure there’s no way one of their responses would have trigger “end” or “redirect” before they complete. There’s also the possibility that they tired of your study and stopped answering questions. I, like you, would default to assuming that the error was on the researcher end and take all possible steps to troubleshoot the problem.