Missing demographic data

⛑ Community Support
1

Hi there,

First time collecting data on Prolific!

I downloaded the Prolific demographic data for my study, and I am concerned that some of the demographic data is missing. There are some cells for ‘age’, ‘student status’ and ‘employment status’ that contain ‘DATA_EXPIRED’. I don’t care about student/employment status, but age is a pretty essential piece of demographic info!

We didn’t include basic demographic questions like age in the study, because Prolific states clearly that these are included by default. Is there are way to recover this missing data, either by contacting Prolific, or participants directly?

What does it mean for such data to be “expired” and how can I prevent this happening in the future? If I set prescreen filters for things like age and simply include the full range/all possible options, will this prevent me from recruiting people with DATA_EXPIRED for these variables? Or is it better to just ask for key demographic data within my own surveys/experiments to ensure this information is captured?

Thanks in advance for your help. :slight_smile:

1 Like
2

Hi,
You’re correct in what has happened: demographics can expire. If you need a demographic for every subject the only way to guarantee it is to aquire it in your questionnaire. For age, sex, race, it’s easy and quick to add and that avoids the situation you’ve discovered (catches all of us once, I think)

As far as a I know, there’s no way to acquire the info other than to whitelist those few subjects into a questionnaire. I guess you could message them and see if they would mind updating their demographics… If so perhaps drop a note back here to say what happens.
T