Resultal tutorial: How to connect your experiment with SONA Systems

Does your university or educational institution use the participant management software SONA Systems? With Resultal it is now possible to automatically grant SONA credits after completion of your survey or experiment. In this brief tutorial we will explain how to connect your Resultal experiment with SONA.

First, you create and test your study on the Resultal platform. Then, setup your study on the SONA platform as you normally would and select “Online external study” to indicate that there is an external connection with the SONA platform. Now, go back to Resultal and find your experiment. In the corresponding toolbar select ‘Options’.

Select ‘Options’ in the experiment toolbar

In the Options menu you find two separate tabs, click on the second tab ‘Sona connection’ to find more instructions and the proper link (URL). Now copy the link in step two to the Study URL field in SONA

Copy the link from your Resultal experiment here

And paste it in SONA here

After you pasted the URL and completed the study information in SONA, go back to the Edit page, where a few buttons appeared in the section ‘Website’. Here, you can check whether the link to your experiment is correct. Just click on ‘View Study Website’ to view the link, or generate a sample link with the embedded ID code so that Resultal knows the participant is a SONA-participant.

For now there is one remaining step to complete the connection between Resultal and SONA: Copy the first URL (client-side) from SONA and paste it in Resultal so that the participant is redirected to SONA after completing your experiment. This way, the participant automatically receives credits.

Here you should be able to test the URL and find the completion URL. Copy the first link.

And paste it to the entry field here

Now, the final step is important! In the entry field make sure to remove the ‘XXXX’ at the end of the URL. The URL should end with an equal sign (‘=’) and nothing else. Your final URL that you add to Resultal should look something like:

https://rug.sona-systems.com/webstudy_credit.aspx?experiment_id=0&credit_token=000000000000&survey_code=

Then click ‘Save’ in the bottom right corner to complete your SONA connection, add timeslots to your study in SONA and you are done!

Participant consent and data access

Another important part with SONA and/or scientific data collection in general is that your participants understand and approve what you are asking from them. This is often described in the consent screen at the start of your experiment. On this screen you describe the elements of your survey or experiment and inform participants of their rights. Furthermore, its is mandatory, depending on the ethical committee of your educational institution, for participants to give active consent to your study.

Within Resultal it is now possible to make active consent mandatory. To do so, select the option at the bottom op the Options tab. By selecting it, participants will have to actively make a decision between ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ at the start of your experiment. Selecting ‘Yes’ will take them to the experiment where they can complete your experiment, while selecting ‘No’ will take them to the end of the experiment and you will collect no data at all. Please be aware that selecting ‘No’ will give the signal to SONA that the participant has completed the experiment, thus granting credits. This is mandatory due to the official position of the Dutch National Ethics Council for Social and Behavioral Sciences.

Select Mandatory consent request to make the informed consent mandatory for participants

Secondly, according to the new GDPR legislation, participants should have the option to access, view and request deletion of their own data. Resultal accommodates this completely by providing the option for the participants to submit an e-mail address for communication. This address will then receive an access link to the platform so they can view the answers and data for your experiment. This e-mail address is stored independently from the participant data and is in no way accessible to the researcher. The answers and data remains anonymous.

Your participants have the option to submit an e-mail address so they can take control of the data.

If your ethical committee asks for more information you can share the following excerpt with them:

As required by GDPR legislation, it is now mandatory to offer participants the option of viewing and/or deleting their own shared data. The platform provides for this. This email is separated from the collected data and is used for this purpose only. Researchers do not have access to this email address and it is processed separately from the data collected in studies.

Or refer to the compliance and privacy policy of Resultal:

RESULTAL - All Your Research and Results in Your Own Hands - Research tools for studies on location…

RESULTAL - All Your Research and Results in Your Own Hands - Research tools for studies on location…

That’s all for now! You should now be able to automatically distribute SONA credtis through your experiments and inform participants about their right to access. If you don’t have an account yet, you can start right away with your first experiment at Resultal. If you have more questions or feedback, feel free to contact us through Twitter or LinkedIn.