using Prolific - automatically approve responses?

[atriskacademic]

Hi,

I am due to launch a survey on Prolific soon. Should I automatically approve responses or do it manually? I haven't got any experience yet with launching surveys through a survey company.

All the best

definitely do it manually to start with. there are all sorts of things that could go wrong and eat up your budget if you do things automatically.

do you have attention checks in your survey? do you have a time limit?

Thanks so much! I have launched the survey today and it's going very well - I have already recruited 80% off the target number of participants and should easily be able to close the project tomorrow.

i set the survey to manual approval, but have so far only rejected two answers which were submitted within two minutes - far too short to give the survey any attention. I have looked at what kind of answers people are given and it seems as if there is good engagement with the questions, which is great given that there are some qualitative questions that require some thought.

Can I ask you one question: I will have two csv files - one from Prolific with the demographic data and one from Qualtrics with my survey data. The common denominator between the two is the Qualtrics ID, which will allow me to match respondents up. How do merge the two files? Any recommendations on how to do the analysis? In SPSS, in Qualtrics itself, ....?

You can probably tell that I am a qualitative researcher :-)!

Well I'm in psychology so my students use R for most analysis. But excel can work for just organising data.

We normally collect demographics again within qualtrics (or gorilla) so there is less merging.

Thanks! I decided not to collect demographics again to avoid making the survey to long - has a limited budget.
I think I'll have to make a trip to our Maths and Statistics Advice hub... or call a colleague in Psychology in my place (I know they are using Prolific a lot).