Prolific

What do you like best about Prolific?

I use prolific many times a year to run research studies. It is easy to use for beginners – you can even run short studies within prolific. I have implemented 99 studies over 7 years of useage. But a major strength is in linking to other systems, like Qualtrics. Customer support is there if you need it, along with a helpful community. hihgly recommended: The data quality is second to none, in my experience, and the security and payments handling has been faultless.

What do you dislike about Prolific?

There are not many dislikes. Minor UI issues, like sorting previous studies, or approving participants are often sorted in response to user feedback. I guess the one niggle is price, but it is good value for money with few competitors. It would be nice to be able to recruit larger samples outside the UK/US, but that is coming along also.

What problems is Prolific solving and how is that benefiting you?

Recruiting large samples of quality participants quickly and reliably. Many use the platform for some time, so they are efficenct, and often available for followups.

What do you like best about Prolific?

I like that you can customise the screeners, even down to excluding individual participants (for example, those who have completed previous experiments of yours or your colleagues). Data collection is very quick and the participants are highly motivated to complete to a high quality. It is a million times easier than recruiting participants in person and you can highly customise your participant pool, making it a representative sample of the population too. It is simple and easy to integrate with your experiment platform. I've used Prolific several times now for studies and am overall very happy with it.

What do you dislike about Prolific?

Sometimes participants have clearly lied about things like their language proficiency, or have not read the instructions that state that they must be from a certain region of the UK, and they get very cross if you reject them on this basis and insist on payment. Customer support could sometimes do with being quicker, as sometimes a participants payment has been approved before they have had a chance to return a submission for you.

What problems is Prolific solving and how is that benefiting you?

We're conducting academic research, and it is often very difficult to get large participant pools that aren't heavily biased towards the student body. This enables us to reach participants from other areas of the country, of a diverse age range, ethnic/cultural background and social class.

What do you like best about Prolific?

1) the ease of use, 2) the efficiency of collecting data, 3) the diversity of sample population, 4) the quality of partcipants

What do you dislike about Prolific?

I feel that Prolific places significant emphasis on protecting participants' interests, which is commendable. However, I have noticed that sometimes participants provide invalid or careless responses to studies or surveys. Despite this, I feel compelled to approve their submissions due to concerns about fairness and Prolific’s policies. This creates a situation where some participants can complete studies extremely quickly and carelessly without facing any consequences.

It would be beneficial if Prolific established clearer rules or guidelines to ensure that participants adhere to standards of quality and provide thoughtful and careful responses when completing studies.

What problems is Prolific solving and how is that benefiting you?

Prolific helps me collect data for psychological studies involving practitioners who are often difficult to recruit in laboratory settings. This sample population is crucial, as it allows us, as psychologists, to draw conclusions that can be generalized to applied settings. Moreover, the data collection process is highly time-efficient, making Prolific an invaluable resource for research.

What do you like best about Prolific?

Prolific makes finding participants with specific demographic backgrounds extremely easy. Moreover, once you've posted an experiment, data collection proceeds extremely quickly. Setting up a study is straightforward, and is easy to integrate with other internet-based data collection platforms. In the rare cases where I've encountered issues (e.g. with generating an invoice for study payments), I've had quick and useful feedback from customer support. Finally, the quality of the data collected tends to be pretty good (as compared to some competitor platforms, e.g. Amazon Mechanical Turk).

What do you dislike about Prolific?

For all that it is straightforward to filter for specific demographic qualifications, the coverage of the user-base doesn't always align with our needs. Recruitment from English-speaking populations is fantastic, but it is often much more difficult to find participants from other language communities (e.g. German). In addition, the service fee is steep. This means that I typically only use prolific if I am in a hurry, or cannot otherwise find participants in my local research network.

What problems is Prolific solving and how is that benefiting you?

I conduct psycholinguistic experiments a part of my role as a linguistics researcher. My field increasingly relies on data collected over the internet, and prolific is a useful platform for finding participants that are reliable, and meet our demographic criteria for inclusion.

What do you like best about Prolific?

Filtering for specific characteristics of participants is very clear. They do a good job of ensuring that you are honest and ethical with your pay to the participants, which I think helps keep the data at a higher quality than other platforms. Setting up studies is very straightforward; they outline clear guidelines for how to comply with their requirements. Customer Support responds quickly.

What do you dislike about Prolific?

Obviously, they aren't going to have every specific characteristic for users, and extremely specific samples might need to look elsewhere (but it is worth checking to see if they do have it). Sometimes, I have found discrepancies between their demographic data of the participants and what the participants self-report (especially in terms of political beliefs), but I think that's endemic to every platform.

What problems is Prolific solving and how is that benefiting you?

I use Prolific to sample participants for research studies. It is probably the most cost-effective / quality ratio you can ask for. For me, as a researcher with very little funds, I very much appreciate that my studies can still be run without breaking the bank.