If you are selecting participants on the basis of particular Prescreen or Mass Testing data, then you may find that only a very small number of participants qualify for your study.
You may use the [Invite Qualified Participants] function in the Prescreen Restrictions sections of your Study Information page only if less than 10% of the pool qualified for your study (see the cutoff limit on the Sona FAQ page - item #1). You may use this function to e-mail a maximum of 100 participants at a time. Thus, if you have 150 students who meet your criteria, you can select to e-mail 65% of them at one time. Note that this sends to a randomly selected group of participants with replacement so on two mailings, some participants may get the e-mail twice whereas others may never receive it. Participants who have already signed up for your study will not receive this e-mail.
This feature is NOT meant to be all-inclusive. We don't want to over-use it and end up bombarding participants with e-mails. It is intended to allow you to randomly invite a small number of participants every now and again. If for some reason, you need to invite all qualifying participants, please contact Research Experiences Group (REG).
You can determine if your sample meets the criteria by viewing the total number of participants who qualify for your study and dividing it by the number of participants who have completed the pretest. You can see the number that qualify for your study by clicking on [View/Modify Restrictions] on the study information page, and you can see the total number of participants who have completed the Pretest on the Researcher frequently asked questions (FAQ) section when you have logged into SONA.
To invite qualified participants:
- Go to the Study Information page for the relevant study.
- Next to [Prescreen Restrictions] click on the [View/Modify Restrictions] link. This will take you to the page where you initially set up any Prescreen Restrictions for your study.
- At the top of the "Study Prescreen Restrictions" page you will see a summary of the questions used for restrictions on your study and a count of the number of participants who meet your criteria. The count will be in bold.
- Below the count of participants, you will see: You may also invite qualified participants to participate in the study. To do this, click on the "[INVITE QUALIFIED PARTICIPANTS]" link.
- You can now type in a message that you would like to send as a study invitation to your qualified participants. This message should be your ORE approved e-mail recruitment script. Be sure to include the following:
- The precise name of your study, as it appears in SONA
- A description of the experiment you are inviting students to sign up for, including the duration/number of credits
- A message about which courses may use the credit from this study (SONA currently does not take course restrictions into effect when sending out study invitations).
Note that SONA automatically includes information about the number of available time slots for your study and will also include the participants' Sona ID codes in the message (although you will not see this yourself).
You may also select study participation exclusions so that you do not send out the e-mail to students who have already signed up for or participated in any studies that you select.
After you send the message, you will be given confirmation of the number of e-mails that were sent.