This information is for Psychology Faculty and Graduate Student users of the subject pool system. Please read this information carefully!
This webpage summarizes basic information about the subject pool. Note that this webpage is not intended to teach you how to use the system. That is mostly self-explanatory once you log on, but documentation is available (see below).
Administrative, procedural, and policy questions may be addressed to the Subject Pool Coordinator, Rich Carlson (racarlson@psu.edu). The Subject Pool Administrator is Sherri Gilliland (sbg4@psu.edu).
Only University Park Psychology faculty may receive Principal Investigator (PI) accounts and subject hour allotments. The subject pool coordinator will distribute an email soliciting allotment requests approximately 3 weeks prior to fall semester, again near the end of fall semester for spring semester, and again near the end of spring semester for summer sessions.
Subject hour allocations are made to PIs (faculty members) based on the requests received. While every attempt will be made to accommodate requests, the subject pool coordinator may adjust allotments downward depending on demand. It is the responsibility of the PI to divide these allocations among the studies for which they are responsible, and to track the use of hours. The system automatically tracks PI hour usage internally and once the allocation is used up, no more slots may be scheduled for studies associated with that PI. Allocations may be increased on request later in the semester depending on availability of hours in the pool.
Every study in the subject pool system will be associated with a PI, and may in addition be associated with one or more Researchers. The PI must be the Psychology faculty member who is responsible for the study. Please do not confuse the Subject Pool PI with the IRB PI, who might be a graduate student.
Each faculty member requesting use of the subject pool will have a PI account and be assigned a Principal Investigator ID, which will be their PSU email ID. Faculty members who are also instructors of courses participating in the subject pool will receive separate Instructor IDs to allow them to view participation records of their students.
Faculty PIs automatically receive their own Researcher accounts.
ALL individuals with researcher accounts listed in the subject pool system must have completed the IRB web-based training and passed the on-line quiz.
Requests for researcher accounts can be submitted by the faculty member/PI at any time. Researchers may be graduate students, undergraduate students, or laboratory staff members. To request researcher accounts, send the following information to the Subject Pool Administrator, Sherri Gilliland (sbg4@psu.edu):
The researcher will receive an email with their initial password, which they may change when they log in to the system.
A researcher may work with several faculty PIs, but their name should appear on the list of researchers approved by each faculty member they work with. Thus, if you are a PI and want a student to work on one of your projects, you must submit their information even if they already have a subject pool account because they work with another faculty.
Each semester PIs will be asked to request Researcher accounts, even for individuals continuing from one semester to another. Researcher accounts that are not associated with a current request will be purged. As you all know, graduate students and undergraduate students are transient and many move on after a given semester. This policy ensures that the system is not bogged down with researcher accounts for individuals who are no longer actively working with the PI.
New studies are added to the subject pool by PIs or by researchers, but a new study will not be active or visible to participants until it has been approved. PIs and Researchers must create their study in the system prior to requesting activation. Sherri cannot create your study for you, she simply activates it and makes it visible. All studies must have a faculty PI. For a study to be approved, the following must be on file with the Subject Pool Administrator, Sherri Gilliland in 130 Moore:
Once the information for a new study has been entered into the system by a PI/Researcher, you must contact the Subject Pool Administrator (Sherri Gilliland) to request approval. Assuming required materials are on file, approval will normally take no more than 24 hours (but studies added after noon on Friday may not be approved until Monday afternoon). If you are adding a study with a pending IRB approval, you can enter the information, but please contact the administrator for approval only after a copy of the IRB approval has been submitted.
Basic Steps for Adding New Studies:
Step 1: Log in and choose "Add a New Study."
Step 2: When you complete the form to add the study; make sure you do the following:
-Select the correct PI to whom the subject hours will be charged.
-Link the appropriate Researchers to the study.
-Set “pretest restrictions” by clicking “yes”, marking “status,” and then marking “I am 18 or older and have no objection to research participation.” This restricts your study to eligible subject pool participants (some students are under 18 and a few are conscientious objectors to the research participation requirement).
-All study times must be posted in 30-minute increments and match the number of credits offered (at .5 credits per 30 minutes), in order for the system to work correctly. It is appropriate to round up; for example, if the study actually takes 45 minutes, please post it as 60 minutes and 1 credit. A 30-minute study is worth .5 credits, a 60-minute study is worth 1 credit, a 90-minute study is worth 1.5 credits, etc.
-We discourage studies that take substantially less than 30-minutes. We recommend adding additional data collection (even for another approved study) to the session to make it 30-minutes.
Step 3: When you are ready to make it active and visible for participant signup, click the "contact adminstrator" link near the bottom of the "add study" page.
This will send email to Sherri Gilliland letting us know you have a study ready for approval.
Sherri will check that an IRB approval, consent form, and debriefing are on file. Make sure that we have the information to make this check, by (a) filling in the IRB approval number, and (b) emailing Sherri at sbg4@psu.edu with the required documentation.
We will check the description to make sure it contains nothing inappropriate, then approve the study to make it visible to participants. We will make every effort to approve studies within 24-36 hours, but it is better to allow more time (and we don't work weekends!).
Researchers or PIs may add new studies at any point, if subject hours remain in the PI’s subject pool allotment.
Adding On-Line Studies
Hosting: All on-line studies must be hosted by an external server (e.g., survey monkey, psychdata). Although Sona has a minimalistic survey application, it has very limited capacity/options and is not available for departmental investigators to use for hosting on-line studies. Given our size and the number of on-line studies the department runs, it would severely tax the system and would require subject pool administrators to manage them in various ways. Therefore our policy is that all on-line studies must be hosted by an external server.
Granting Credit: On-line studies hosted on external servers do not automatically grant participation credit within the SONA system. Students may sign up for on-line studies using the subject pool website, but credit is not automatically granted when the student completes an externally hosted on-line study. Granting credit for these studies is completed the same way a direct recruit study is credited. Investigators must grant credit manually. Be sure your on-line study includes appropriate information to ensure you can confirm participation and manaully grant credit via your study's timeslots. Participants who have signed up will have an "awaiting action" indicator to prompt you to grant credits.
All studies using the subject pool must have IRB approval, and participants must receive a written “debriefing” that describes the purpose of the study at a level that is appropriate for introductory psychology students. Please note that this educational debriefing is required for subject pool participants, regardless of whether the IRB would require a debriefing for your particular study. The debriefing should link the purpose of the study to concepts typically covered in PSY 100, should be about one typed page in length, and should provide contact information in case the participant has questions. Generally, participants should receive a written copy of the debriefing at completion of the study; exceptions to this must be approved in advance.
If the PI on the IRB approval is not a Psychology Department faculty member, be sure to indicate the responsible faculty member as the subject pool PI.
The subject pool is shut down between semesters for maintenance and preparation for the next semester. During these periods, all studies are no longer visible and accounts are disabled. When preparation for the new semester is complete, accounts are activated.
PIs/Researchers must request that existing studies already in the system be made visible for the current semester. To make an existing study visible, PIs/Researchers must ensure the most current versions of the following materials are on file with Sherri Gilliland (sbg4@psu.edu):
If there are no changes to an existing study and your IRB approval is still current, simply email your request to Sherri Gilliland confirming this to be the case.
PIs/Researchers are responsible for managing studies. This includes creating the studies, setting up time slots for participant sign up, and recording participant credits and no-shows within 48 hours of participation.
Any number of researchers may be associated with a study, and all researchers associated with the study will have the same privileges for editing study information, managing timeslots, and recording credits/no-shows.
Researchers or PIs may add time slots for an ongoing approved study at any point as long as subject hours remain in the PIs subject pool allotment. To add time slots your study must be “active.” You can make it active yourself. Approval and administrator action is needed to make it "visible." If there are time slots already set up when the study is made visible, they will appear almost immediately. If you are adding time slots to a study that is already visible, they will appear almost immediately after you finish creating and verifying them.
Study information may be edited at any time (for example, to add researchers) but if the study name, abstract, eligibility requirements, or description fields are changed, the study will need to be re-approved by the administrator before it is visible to participants.
Recording Credits and No-Shows: There are no paper credit receipts in the new subject pool system. Participants can view their account to find out their credit status for particular studies. Credit must be updated within 48 hours of the experimental session (and the administrator will automatically receive email notification when this is not done – so big brother is watching!). No-shows will be penalized as before – that is, failing to attend a scheduled session will increase the required hours
As in the past, the “48-hour rule” includes Web-based studies! Indeed, it is especially important for web-based studies, as many students are asking how they can know that their responses have really been received and recorded. Please update credit status on a regular basis, so that the subject pool administrators aren't swamped with emails asking "when will my credit appear?"
All subject pool participants complete the two questions shown below when signing up for the subject pool. This is referred to as the “pretest.” This information may be used to set pretest restrictions for your study. These restrictions limit the visibility of time slots for your study to those participants who meet the restrictions.
Please note the following rules for using pretest information:
Rule 1: All studies, unless they have been specifically approved for participation by minors and include a means for obtaining parental consent, should be restricted to participants who selected the first choice for question 1 (status): “I am 18 or older and have no objection to research participation.”
Rule 2. Question 2 (Gender) may be used to restrict visibility only if the use of such restrictions is included in the IRB approval of your study.
Rule 3. You may not under any circumstances use pretest responses as a basis for contacting participants directly; they are to be used only to restrict the visibility of time slots to participants eligible to be included in your study as approved by the IRB.
The current pretest is as follows:
Welcome to the Psychology Department Subject Pool System. In order to set up your account correctly, we need to ask three brief questions. The answers to these questions will be used only for the system to identify those studies in which you are eligible to be included.
1. Please indicate your status
I am 18 or older and have no objection to research participation
I am 18 or older and conscientiously object to research participation
I am not yet 182. Please indicate your gender
Female
Male
The mass screening is completely electronic. The subject pool coordinator will email requests for mass screening materials at the same time PI allotments are requested. All materials for mass screening must be submitted in electronic format (preferably a .doc or .txt file). Please be aware that space is limited and we cannot guarantee availability until all requests are in for a given semester.
To participate in the mass screening, the investigator must also submit IRB approval for the study or studies that use their submitted materials as a screen to recruit selected participants. The mass screening is not available for stand alone data collection.
You may submit materials for the mass screening if the instruments have been previously approved by the IRB and your using them for screening is pending IRB approval. However, you will not receive your screening data until IRB approval has been forwarded to the Subject Pool Coordinator.
Students who participate in the mass screening provide consent to be contacted by investigators for recruiting purposes based on their survey responses.
About 3 weeks after the semester starts, investigators using the mass screening who have submitted appropriate IRB approvals will receive an Excel file containing their raw data and contact information for participants. It is the PI/Researcher’s responsibility to score their data.
Unlike the “pretest,” mass screening results cannot be used to limit visibility of studies or time slots. Participants recruited on the basis of mass screening results will be directly contacted by researchers, as in the past.
To give students credit for participation in direct-recruited studies, researchers must create studies on line and have them approved, as described in the materials above. The only difference is that you do not enter any predetermined time slots for the study into the system (these are only used if students directly sign up for studies on the Web). Instead, please make sure the Subject Pool administrator is informed that the study is direct recruit and should not be visible to other participants. To give credit for participation in a direct recruit study, create a slot, use the manual sign-up option, and then give the participant credit. Remember that credit is to be given within 48 hours of participation.
Please note there is no mass screening during the Summer sessions due to the limited enrollment in introductory psychology courses.
PARTICIPANTS will receive automatic email:
-with their login information when they create their accounts
-with confirmation when they sign up for a study or cancel an appointment
-as a reminder the day before their session is scheduled
-with confirmation when they receive credit for a study
-when a researcher cancels an appointment (MUST be done 24 hours in advance)
PIs and RESEARCHERS will receive automatic email:
-with their login information when their account is created
-as a reminder of their appointments for the next day (researchers may
turn off this feature)
In addition, special announcements may occasionally be sent to groups (e.g., all instructors, all researchers) by the Subject Pool administrator
System documentation for PI/Researcher accounts (pdf file)
This documentation is from the developers of our subject pool software, and describes how to use the features of the pool accessible to those with PI and Researcher accounts.
IRB proposal
and consent form language Fall 2007 (pdf file)
This document includes specific language to be used in IRB proposals and consent forms when participants are recruited from the Psychology subject pool.
This page was last updated on 8-23-07
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