Sona Information: Alternative Participation Compensation
SONA WEBSITE: http://ubco.sona-systems.com/
Creating a Draw
If the researcher is interested in including participants who are not registered in courses receiving Sona bonus credit, a prize draw is an effective alternative. This alternative will also attract participants who may already have completed their Sona requirements, but are interested in participating in more studies.
To utilize this option, a second "twin-study" must be created with the same title and description as its credit-based alternative. This is accomplished by the same means as creating the original study.
- To differentiate between the compensation offered in the two studies, add the word "DRAW" to the end of the twin-study title, and the word "CREDIT" to the end of the original study.
It is imperative to clearly state in the twin-study's description that participants will not receive credit, but will instead be entered in a draw to win a prize (also be sure to clearly state what the prize would be). For online questionnaires the same link will be used for both the credit and draw versions of the study.
- Participants may also be inhibited from signing up for both of the study versions by adding a "Sign-Up Restriction" to both of the studies
Entering Participants in a Draw
The procedure of adding participants' names into the draw list on Sona is very similar to the procedure for assigning course credit. Participants who are signed up for the draw-based twin-study will be included in the Uncredited Timeslots list for the study. After the participants have been confirmed to have participated, they should be marked as "Participated". This way, at the end of the data collection stage, the researcher will have a list of names from which to draw participants for prizes.
Tips to Avoid Later Confusion
Unfortunately (but realistically), participants will occaisionally sign up for the draw option when they intended on participating for credit. For on-site studies the researcher may delete the participant from the draw study and place them in the appropriate time slot in the credit study manually. For online studies, when using participation ID codes or the Third-party procedure, the chances of this happening may be reduced by asking participants to indicate whether they are interested in receiving credit or the alternative compensation (e.g., entering a draw) in the body of the email, along with their ID codes. If this method is pursued, each participant who is receiving credit should be marked as "CREDIT" when the researcher (or the intermediary responsible for receiving the codes in the Third-party procedure) creates and updates the code list.
Last reviewed 
2/4/2011 1:10:10 PM
