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Recruitment

When you have finished designing your experiment and want to invite people to take part, you can add a new Batch of participants on the Participants page of the latest version of your experiment. This Batch is a set of rules and mechanics for a group of participants as well as a limit to how many participants can enter for that batch. This page describes this process in detail.

Basics

  1. Follow the getting started guide to make a Version of your experiment. If you're looking at one of the versions, you should see a Participants tab. Go here to manage your Batches.
  2. On the Participants / Batches page, you'll see a list of any previous batches you've created. Each Batch is denoted with a letter (A, B, C..). The batch also display its number of slots, a progress bar for the slots (grey for available slots, striped-blue for participants who have started, and green for finished participants, hover over it to see the numbers), and the total number of minutes participants have been doing your experiment. You can click on the batch to find it's link and settings.
  3. To create a new Batch, press Create a new Batch.. and a form appears. The form's recruitment section has a dropdown to select a template; the default template is Share Link but you can also choose one for the various recruitment services (see the links below for more on these).
  4. The Share Link template has two sections; the Entry URL which you'll share with your participants after finalising the batch, and an Entry options section.
  5. requires Meadows login With this option turned on, the participant can only enter after registering and logging in with a Meadows account. We recommend this for longer experiments where the participants may be logged out when taking a break. store referring page This will store the URL of the page where the participant came from when they entered Meadows. This may be useful to resolve recruitment issues, but it would require the participant's consent as this may contain sensitive and/or personal information.
  6. The next thing to configure is the number of available slots in this batch. We recommend making this number larger than your target sample, as many participants may start the task, and then quit, taking up a slot.
  7. Next, remember to click Create to finalize your batch.
  8. After this the page reloads and you'll see the new batch listed. Click on it to review your configuration and to copy the Entry URL to send to your participants. You can customize the entry URL with the short/long and batch/any switches. The short URL uses our shortening domain mead.ac. The Batch-specific option leads specifically to this batch, which can be useful when you still have other unfinished batches with different settings. The default "any" link can lead to any batch with open slots, and the same parameters, for this version of your experiment.

Use of a recruitment platform

One popular method to source participants is through a commercial or institutional recruitment service. If you're using one of these, have a look at the guides below. Is your service of choice not listed? Contact us and perhaps we can add integration for it.