Prolific surveys

What is Prolific surveys

Prolific was founded in 2014.

At first, it was actually called Prolific Academic, and many people still seem to call it this name. But because the name was a bit long and clumsy, it was changed to just be called “Prolific” which is now the official name of the platform.

Its website is now Prolific(dot)co

But if you hear or read the name Prolific Academic, it is the same platform as Prolific – but some people are just still not aware that it has changed its name (even though it was changed already in 2015).

As I mentioned earlier, Prolific.co is a bit different than many other survey sites. So let’s start by going over how it is different and then how you can earn as a member.

How Prolific is different

The story behind Prolific is what first of all makes it different from many other survey sites.

It was founded because two PhD students found it difficult to recruit participants for their research.

They, therefore, decided to start a platform on their own that would make it easy for researchers to recruit panel participants from all over the world and a way for participants to get paid for contributing easily.

Prolific is therefore now a crowdsourcing platform for both researchers and for people that want to give feedback, help research, and get paid at the same time.

In their words, ‘Prolific is the world's largest crowd-sourcing community of people who love science. Researchers post studies and recruit the right participants fast. Participants earn rewards while helping to advance human knowledge’.

What does Prolific Surveys offer

So that is all very nice, but how are the actual opportunities there, and are Prolific surveys even worth participating in?

Let’s look into the opportunities for both participants and researchers to give you a better idea.

Opportunity 1 – Earn money on Prolific:

You can sign up for Prolific to earn money by answering surveys or participate in studies.

As it is a platform that is meant to help researchers get answers and feedback, it is dependent on researchers to make surveys available.

That also means that there will not be as many available surveys as on many other survey sites but this will depend a lot on the country you live in – in some countries you will be invited quite often and in others, you might almost never get invited (more about which countries it is available in later).

However, the surveys here are all quite interesting.

They are all academic studies, but that does not mean that you have to have an academic degree to participate. It just means that the answers are used for research at for example universities.

All you need to do is to give your opinion and feedback in the surveys like on any other survey site. So no matter your background, you can sign up and get access to surveys.

As many of the surveys are very specialized and about a very specific topic, they sometimes require you to have a certain demographic profile to be able to participate. It can for example be where you live, what you do for a living, how many children you have, etc.

So Prolific has some very interesting surveys to participate in, and it is definitely a legit site that is working with reputable researchers from all over the world.

So your answers will have a direct effect on the newest research, which is pretty cool. But because the platform is so targeted, it also means that you will not have access to daily surveys, and maybe not even weekly surveys depending on your profile.

Whenever there is an available study, you will receive an email. If you wish to participate, it is a good idea not to wait too long to take the survey, as some studies fill up very quickly.

A way to make sure you get notified is also to download the Prolific Chrome extension called “Prolific Assistant”.

It will notify you whenever there are new surveys available and can help you get to them before they fill up.

The surveys are usually not very long and they pay decently for your time. On average they are 10-20 minutes, but you can also at times find shorter or longer surveys.

You can always see the approximate lenght of a survey before starting and then decide whether you want to take it or not.

Opportunity 2 – For researchers:

As mentioned, Prolific is a crowdsourcing platform that is also very much focused on giving researchers easy access to recruiting participants for surveys and research panels.

So if you need participants for your next study, it might be worth considering Prolific.

You can decide the prescreening for your study yourself, and for example filter participants by age, sex, nationality, language, and more.

If you have a study that is hosted in another system like for example Qualtrics or SurveyMonkey, you can just insert the URL and still recruit participants on Prolific.

It is free to sign up for Prolific. But as a researcher, you, of course, have to pay the rewards to the participants + an administrative fee to Prolific.

The exact reward you give participants is more or less up to you, but Prolific encourages to reward with at least $6.5 per hour.