Prolific's data quality just got even better with Onfido ID verification
Achieving high quality data is the most important thing we focus on at Prolific. Without it, it’s hard to trust research.
Making sure we have a real, human participant pool is massively important for data quality. You can’t have fake people giving answers. You also can’t have the same person answering the same survey twice.
There are a few times throughout the research cycle that help us check participant quality.
- When participants first sign up
- During their introduction study
- Every time participants respond to new studies
You can learn more about how these checks work here, or read on to see how we’ve just improved participant sign up checks.
We’ve introduced Onfido ID verification
There are a few things to check when participants join Prolific. Are they a real person? Are they who they say they are? Are they where they say they are?
There’s a 4-step process participants must complete before accessing any studies. We ask for email, phone, ID verification and a trial study.
Whilst phone numbers and emails are helpful, it’s easier to create a second email address or have a second phone than to get a second real ID. That’s why we invest a lot of time and effort into ensuring we provide the highest standard of ID checks.
This month we switched to the best ID verification tool, Onfido. We have been verifying participant IDs since January 2021, but Onfido brings new levels of accuracy and speed.
Onfido supports over 4,600 documents types from 195 countries, enabling us to increase our trust in participants across the world.
Switching to Onfido means we’re twice as likely to catch bad actors before they enter the participant pool. It means we can expect even better data quality than our already exceptionally high quality.
We’re always looking to improve our data quality
Whilst we want to make the sign-up and research processes as simple as possible, it’s important that we have these checks in place. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to deliver the outstanding data quality we do today.
What’s great is that bad actors are a minority on Prolific, but we always strive to get as close to 100% data quality for each study.
Why not sign up to try our participants out? There’s no minimum spend and you won’t be disappointed.
