Participant Compliance

Ensuring Participant Compliance

How to automatically check whether participants are completing their questionnaires

Once your participants start their experience sampling data collection period, you will want to ensure that they are completing their questionnaires. For example, if they are completing one nightly survey, you may want to check whether they are completing their surveys, so that you can remind them in the morning to complete it if they have forgotten. In contrast, if you are signaling participants multiple times a day, you may want participants to complete a certain number of surveys each day even though you signal them more often (e.g., you choose to signal participants six times each day, but only require them to complete 5 each day). Moreover, you may choose to compensate participants based on the number of questionnaires they complete. Thus, you will need some method of tracking your participants’ compliance. In this section, we will demonstrate how to implement two tools that you can use to manage participants’ compliance. The first tool checks will count the number of surveys participants have completed at the end of each day. The second tool will send the participant a reminder email if they forgot to complete their questionnaire or if they have completed fewer questionnaires than the required minimum. These tools, however, are currently only available for the Google data storage option because they both use Google Script.

Compliance Checker

We have posted everything you'll need on GitHub.
You can access the script here, and the instructions here.
The instructions also includes an explanation of the script, which you can find here, followed by and instructions on how to implement it here.
You can also look at an example compliance sheet on Google sheets here.

Compliance Emailer

Once you have determined the number of questionnaires each participant has completed, you may want to remind participants who have completed fewer than acceptable. You can use our compliance emailer Google Script. Everything you need can be found on Github.
You can access the script here, and the instructions here.
The instructions also includes an explanation of the script, which you can find here, followed by and instructions on how to implement it here.

Now you're ready to collect data from your participants. Check back in when you're ready to analyze your data