Description
SONA is an online software created by SONA Systems, several universities and private research companies use similar software to keep track of research participants and their compensation after participating in a study.
The Department of Psychology and Child Development has its own instance using this software, you may log in by going to the portal on this link.
If you are taking my class, it is likely I already added you to SONA’s database, therefore you will be able to create new studies on SONA.
I will show you on this tutorial how to create a new study on SONA.
Step 1
Go to the psychology log in web page by clicking here.
The webpage should look like the picture below:
Step 2
Type your CSU Stan email as your User ID, and the password you set before. You may have recieved an email with a random temporal password. You may continue using the random password or change it to a more friendly and secure password.
Step 3
You will see a page similar to the one showed next. But, in your case it should say that you have two roles, one role is participant and the other is researcher. Select your role as researcher to start creating your new study. In my case, I have two roles, I’m administrator and principal investigator.
Step 4
Once you select your role as researcher , you will see the following page:
Click on “Create a new study” as showed in the picture.
Step 5
You will see a new page after clicking on “Create a new study”. In this new page, you will see multiple options. In most cases, the right option is “Online External Study” as shown in the image below:
Select the option that says “Credit”, we don’t have money to pay for participation . After that, click on “Continue”
Step 6
In this step you will have to type specific information related to your research project:
- Study Name
- Brief Abstract
- Detailed Description
- Eligibility Requirements: add requirement such as minimum age to participante.
- Duration in minutes (write how long it takes to finish the survey)
- How many credits will the participant earn after participating in your study? (You can specify 1 credit).
- Preparation is optional. Keep it blank if you don’t need to add information in this section.
- Researcher: Look for my name and your group members in the list. Double click on the names to add them to the study as researchers. If you have the option to specify a principal investigator you can add me there.
- YOU MUST add your IRB approval number.
- YOU MUST add your IRB approval expiration.
- Approved? This is an option administrated by the general admin. This means that another faculty who is the general admin has to approve your project.
- Study URL: you should add your Qualtrics link in this section.
You may ignore the rest of the options and keep the default values.
Step 6
After creating the study, you should click on “Study Menu” , and then click on “View/Administer Time Slots”:
Step 7
Now click on “Add a Timeslot”:
Step 8
Finally, set a Final Participation Date, normally the last day of classes should be appropriate. Set a final time, and type the maximum number of participants. Add a large number such as 300 participants. You will not get 300 students but it is just better if you give a large number to the software.
Step 9
After you finish all these steps, your project will be ready to be delivered on SONA but, there is an extra step: you have to ask for approval to the general admin, you will make the request by clicking: “Send request”. The admin will return the decision with comments if there are problems with the submission.
