I am a member of Prolific who help researchers get data for Research they want done through surveys where the users get paid for their time depending on the lenght of the survey etc.. Recently I received an Invitation do a survey which was 15 minutes long for £5, about artificial intelligence being fair. I did the survey which lasted longer than 15 minutes and at the end I was expecting a completion code, which did not materialise, so I clicked the complete study icon and it gave me a code which I then submitted. A bit later in the day I noticed that the submiossion had been "timed out". I contacted the researcher and explained that what had happened. This is the reply I received "Dear Participant, Firstly, I really would like to THANK YOU if you have taken the time to complete our survey. We received a lot of good and high-quality data. THANK YOU!!! However, there has also been a technical issue with the completion time parameter setup, which caused most of you to be timed out. You may know that when a participant is timed-out, Prolific looks for new participants. As a result, we had more than 1300 responses, instead of 400. Our initial project allowance was for 400 participants, but as I said previously, we really value participants' effort and time in taking the survey, and we recognise that the issue was not on your side. So, we as a team worked hard in the past few days to figure out the problem, and see what we could do to pay back most of you. I manually checked all participants in timed-out and awaiting review status, and we raised our allowance as much as we could. As a result, 89% of the total submissions will be accepted despite your timed-out status. If you receive a rejection, please do not take it personally. The rejection is not related to the timed-out status per se, but to the criteria, we mentioned in our ad (e.g., multiple attention checks failed, survey completed too quickly, etc.). Further, Prolific recorded some submissions of which we haven't received any data, and so we are unable to verify and accept those submissions. I will reject or approve and pay participants who result in "awaiting review" status first, and I will move on to those in "timed-out" later. Please, consider that on our side we have to compute the new budget needed to cover the extra cost and make a new payment to Prolific. We will do it as quick as possible, but it may take a few days. Do not panic, if you don't receive your reward straightforward. I hope you can all appreciate our effort and work and this message clarifies how we have decided to proceed. Thank you again for taking part in the survey." This is my reply "Thank you for your message. I'm not totally satisfied with your message. I know I spent a great deal of time doing the survey with all the checks correctly done. If I find a rejection then I will put it down to a bad experience and put my experience down in trust pilot. Your survey should have been tested before being issued." The reply from the researcher is "The survey was tested, unfortunately, we cannot see the completion time when we test it, and so that issue was missed during the test. Timed-out submissions which will not be approved will not be penalised. I will leave them as timed-out. Without a rejection you will not be penalised.". So basically the research team have not tested the survey properly and have data from more than 400 participants, 900 more to be precise, whose data they will use but not pay for their time. They should have limited the participants to 400 and not let it be overscribed as other surbeys on prolific do. Hopefully people will be aware of this university team and avoid completing surveys from them
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