More New Zealand participants

💭 Ideas & Feedback Vote for New Participant Demographics
#1

Kia ora from Aotearoa!

I’m a researcher located in Auckland, New Zealand. I’m an avid user of Prolific, but one recurring challenge I and my students face is the relatively small number of New Zealanders on the platform.

Often, researchers and postgrad students in NZ will want to recruit an NZ-specific sample, for a variety of reasons. These can range from having a research question that’s specific to NZ, to engaging in Kaupapa Māori research, to institutional difficulties relating to recruitment of overseas participants, to simply wanting to ensure that our study materials are linguistically and culturally relevant to the sample.

Unfortunately, the current sample size on Prolific residing in NZ means that it isn’t possible to do a well-powered study with NZ participants for all but the simplest of research questions. As of today there are currently 389 people active in the past 90 days who list their current country of residence as New Zealand. (As background, our population is about 5 million).

If this is something Prolific is open to I would be very happy to try and help in some way. There are a lot of active researchers in NZ, and availability of local participants could lead to more researchers using the platform.

Let me know what you think!
Matt

4 Likes
#2

As an action to take, you might be able to recruit locally with an advert that asks people to sign up to prolific to join your study?

Another sample-enhancement opportunity that would be for studies where culture is a variable would be larger (i.e. say 5-10k vs. current ~low hundreds) samples from, e.g. China, Japan, Israel, Eastern Europe. Of course no good if they seldom get invited to take part, or if language is a barrier.

#3

Hi Tim, that’s definitely something I’m open to. I’d be hesitant to do that completely off my own bat, though, because of the risk that any participants signing up just end up on the Prolific waitlist. But if Prolific were willing to collaborate with me on this so I could have some confidence it’d work smoothly, I’d definitely be up for it!

#4

I agree, this would be very helpful for NZ-based research.