Longitudinal study: save data in meaningful way

SINE

Hi All,

I am working on how to best organize the result data coming from a longitudinal study, where participants are provided with a General Multiple Worker on Prolific. Now, let's say that I have two sessions and that I have just one batch. The same participant will click on the General Multiple worker twice, and each time will be assigned a different worker.

This makes data retrieval quite messy: it is difficult to understand whether a result file corresponds to the first session or to the second. It is also difficult to understand which results come from the same participant. It requires manual inspection, and when participants are many, this is very time consuming.

What is the best way to organize the data? Is it possible to assign a worker ID to a participant and have the second session results saved under the same worker ID? Something like the group session data would be nice; I would like to have the workers of the same participant in the same group. But I am not sure how to organize this. Any tip would be much appreciated!

Thanks! 😎

elisa

Hi,

On Prolific it's actually easy: use the Prolific ID to align the data from two participants. (See point 2. in this page on the JATOS docs: https://www.jatos.org/Use-Prolific.html#2-optional-consider-passing-prolific-url-parameters-to-your-study)

I don't know how you coded your study, but you can always add a first component where you check if that prolific ID exists in the Batch session data. If it doesn't exist, you can add (for example) the value session_number = 1 to the result data, and session_number = 2 otherwise.

Hope this helps. With more details, I can give you a more detailed example for how you would implement this in your study.

Elisa