Running qualitative interviews on Prolific

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Hi. I have previously conducted quite a lot of quantitative surveys using Prolific. A colleague has mentioned that Prolific also have a feature to run interviews? I have a qualitative piece of research coming up and i would love to hear more about using Prolific to hold interviews and learn more about how this works?

Many thanks,
Rosie

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Hi Rosie, so great to have you here!

You can certainly interview participants via the platform. The same policies regarding fair payment, personal information etc still apply. :slight_smile:

Here’s the key info you need:

  • You can link to a booking form, where participants can specify their availability for the interview, then give them a completion code, but only approve and pay the submission once they complete the interview.

  • We have an existing screener for “Would you be willing to record yourself via a webcam as part of a study?”, which you should use to recruit only participants who have stated they’re happy to take part in such a study in advance of being made eligible. Collection of personal information is not usually permitted on Prolific, so participants would need to be assured that any personal details (e.g. Skype usernames) collected will only be used to contact them for the interview, and deleted as soon as this purpose has been fulfilled.

  • You may wish to make use of our anonymised messaging system to help with the logistics of arranging the interviews: Sending messages to participants.

  • Finally, we would recommend running a pilot study to make sure the process is running smoothly on our platform. We do have other researchers carrying out these kind of studies but it is not the most common format.

I hope this helps! Let me know if anything is unclear.

For a full breakdown of the interviewing process, see our help centre article

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Thanks Josh - this was really helpful.

I have another question. I am also looking at doing a small survey study on university students in the UK to generate some topics for the qualitative study. I only need around 50 university students to participate - but is there any way to limit the amount of people that respond across different regions in the UK (e.g. 5 10 from the NW of England, 10 from the NE of England etc)? This would give me a better picture of university students responses in different parts of the UK.

Many Thanks,
Rosie

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Happy to help!

To get your target demographic you can use two of our pre-screeners: ‘Student Status’ and ‘Current UK area of residence’.

It isn’t currently possible to limit the amount of people who respond in the way you’d like to unfortunately. Instead, you’ll need to create a separate study for each demographic i.e. one study which targets students from NW England, and another which targets those from NE England.

I hope that makes sense. Let me know if anything is unclear :slight_smile:

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Thanks Josh that was very useful - i will base it on using multiple studies for different regions of the UK.

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Hi Josh,

I was planning to start my research next week. Prolific was recommended by a fellow student, she invited me and with the invite came something like 219 pounds. Currently I’m getting ready to start the research but I noticed the 219 pounds disappeared. I was wondering why? It stated that I should top it before the 16th of this month but now it’s already gone. Could you help me with this? I really needed the extra pounds to get enough participants.

Thank you in advance,

Thom

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