Sequence of URLs

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Sequence of URLs allows you to send the same data as URL parameters to a numbers of URLs that together make up your experiment. Typically You will start from SONA or Prolific, then go to an informed consent form, then to an online experiment or survey and then back to Prolific for completion of the experiment.

Simple example

If you want to visit two URLs and let both know that your name is John, you can visit these pages like this:

But you may want to prevent having to type the same information twice. That is where Sequence of URLs can help. Put your two URLs in a Sequence:

A sequence of two URLs

now you can visit the following two URLs:

which will be automatically forwarded to the two URLs mentioned above. Note that the name is automatically send to both pages, while it was entered only for the first.

Prolific

Imagine you want to conduct an online experiment with Prolific and you want to your participants to visit the following three places:

  • Informed consent
  • Online Experiment
  • Prolific completion

If the informed consent form is of the type that is most common in the Donders Center for Cognition, the experiment is on our exp server this will give you three URL's for these places like this:

The last of the three comes from Prolific:

Form on the Prolific study page showing the completion URL.

Since you programmed coolExperiment yourself you can make sure that the last page contains a link to the completion URL, but to let the informed consent survey know where the experiment is, you have to add it in the first URL like this:

You may have never done this before by hand, since it is done for you by URL Composer. This works but typically we want to make it even more complicated. The experiment wants to keep track of the prolific pid to identify unique participants. In the past we could use URL Composer for an even more complicated URL, but that no longer works (2023-06-16) therefore we need Sequence of URLs, a small tool that makes aliases for the three URLs in your experiment and keeps track of the prolific pid for you. Just enter the three URLs there:

like this.

Three URLs that make up an experiment

Instead of linking to the informed consent form directly, you link prolific to the first URL in the sequence:

form on the prolific study page showing the experiment url.

Now all three URLs will receive the prolific PID, study id, etc.

SONA and Prolific

Imagine you want to conduct an online experiment with two panel systems that recruit participants to the same experiment, SONA and Prolific, and you want to your participants to visit the following places:

  • Online Experiment in Limesurvey
  • SONA or Prolific completion, depending on where they were recruited

As the three URLs in Sequence you input (mutatis mutandis):

Note that we leave out the last part of the completion URL that the SONA experiment page gives (&survey_code=XXXXXX) since that is taken care of by Sequence

As the SONA study url you should use without Sequence:

but because you use Sequence you replace the first part:

As the Prolific study url you should use without Sequence:

but with Sequence you replace the first part:

Note that you only enter the part up to but not including the question mark in Prolific and Polific will add the rest.

All that we now have to do is set a Limesurvey end url that points either to SONA or to Prolific:

which in normal English means something like: if there is no PROLIFIC PID, go to Sequence page 1, otherwise go to Sequence page 2.

Privacy

This method looks a bit like the way the worlds largest privacy breakers work. These web pages receive the name of the person visiting them without the participant sending it explicitly also.

This is precisely the intention of Sequence, but it is also very different. Rather than saving a persistent cookie and storing the participants information for later use, we save only the precise information entered by the participant, store it only on the participants computer and store it only during the session. Therefore no cookie notice is required. You only need to inform the participant that the information of the separate parts of the experiment is combined, like you would do anyway in your informed consent form.

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