To add a study, choose the Add New Study option from the top toolbar. You will need to pick from four possible types of studies. Please choose this carefully as you are not able to change this later. After you choose, the study type you’ll see a form asking for more information. You will need to fill out a number of fields, which are explained in the following table. Some of the fields listed below may not appear, depending on how your system is configured and the type of study you selected. All fields must be filled out unless otherwise noted. Explanation Study Name A short name for the study. This is how the study is identified throughout the system. Most systems are configured so studies show in a random order to participants (choose Your Studies on the toolbar and it will state at the bottom of the resulting page if they are displayed in random order), so there is no advantage in choosing a study name that might put it at the top of an alphabetical list. You should consult with your administrator if there is a naming convention to be followed when naming studies. Study names must be unique, and you will be prevented from adding a study if there is already another study in the system with the same name. A study name may be up to 100 characters in length. Brief Abstract (this feature might be disabled on your system) This is a short one or two line description of the study. This short description will be displayed to participants when they view the entire list of studies, so you may want to list the most pertinent details here. Studies configured for payment usually have the compensation information included here, particular if the payment varies based certain outcomes. This field may be optional, and can be up to 255 characters in length. Detailed Description (this feature be disabled on your system) This can be a rather lengthy description about the study, and it will show if a participants clicks on the study to get more information, before they sign up. You may include basic HTML in this area, but please be sure you know what you are doing (ask your IT department for help if you are unsure). If you would like to add a
on a per-study basis. The fixed time setting always indicates the day before the study is to occur. Time Threshold Includes Weekends Yes or No value to indicate if the system should factor in weekends when enforcing the sign-up and cancellation time limits. If set to Yes, then a deadline that would ordinarily occur on a weekend is pushed back to the Friday before the weekend. The system will push back the deadline in full days, so a rolling time window threshold that would occur at 2:30pm on Sunday would be moved to 2:30pm on Friday. If set to No, the deadline may occur on a weekend. Random Study Order Yes or No value to indicate if the system should list studies (to participants) in random or alphabetical (by study name) order. All non-participants will always see studies listed in alphabetical order. If random order is chosen, the list of studies is randomly listed every time a participant views the list of available studies. Credit Display Yes or No value to indicate if the credit value for studies should be listed on the study listing page, for participants. The credit value will always be visible once a participant clicks on a study to learn more about it. The reason to disable the credit display from the main study listing page is if there is a concern that participants are more or less likely to view studies that have a higher credit value. If set to Yes, the credit value will be displayed on the study listing page. Available Study Display Yes or No value to indicate if all (active, approved) studies should be displayed to participants when they go to view the list of studies. If set to No, then only those studies with available timeslots will be listed. It may be useful to set this to Yes if there are frequent changes in timeslot availability and you want to make a participant aware of studies even if there are no timeslots available at the moment. Online Display Yes or No value to indicate if on the list of studies displayed to participants, participants can see immediately if the study is an online study. If this is set to No, there will be no indication on the page listing all the studies to participants that the study is an online study. This may help to reduce selection bias. Regardless of this setting, once the participant clicks on a specific study, they will see at that point if it is an
study a participant must not have participated in in order to participate in a study). If set to Yes, researchers may choose as many pre-requisites and/or disqualifiers for their studies as they like (they may opt not to). If set to No, researchers are never given such an option, and pre-requisites and disqualifiers are not allowed. Pre-Requisite Enforcement Leniency Yes or No value indicating whether the system should be lenient in enforcing pre-requisites. If set to Yes, a participant may sign up for a study that has a as long as they are signed up for the study also. If set to No, the system will be strict and a participant must have received credit for the pre-requisite study before they may sign up. An example where leniency might be useful is if on a Monday, a participant signs up for Study A for Wednesday, and they want to sign up for Study B for Friday. Study B has a pre-requisite of Study A. If this value is set to Yes, the participant is allowed to sign up for Study B because they are signed up for Study A. If the value is set to No, they cannot sign up for Study B until they have received credit for Study A (which will likely occur after they participate in Study A, on Wednesday). Course Restriction Feature Yes or No value indicating if the course restriction feature should be made available. If set to Yes, researchers can choose to limit participation in their studies to participants enrolled in specified courses. If a participant is not enrolled any of the specified courses, the study will not show up on the list of available studies. Such restrictions are particularly useful when the participants span a wide range of courses, and certain studies should be off-limits to participants who may have learned about the details of a certain type of research in their courses, such that their participation may affect the integrity of the research. Timeslot Restriction This setting may be enabled so the system enforces restrictions on the number of experimental timeslot available. It can be restricted on a per-researcher basis (a researcher has a specified number of hours to allocate across all their studies), per-P.I. basis, or basis (restrictions are linked to a specific study). Only one type of restriction may be chosen If Multiple Researchers per Study is enabled, then the per-researcher basis for restriction is not