Retention of participants recruited to a multi-year longitudinal study via Prolific
Abstract
There is limited data on the retention of participants on online crowdsourcing platforms. This presents a summary of retention within a study on vaccination attitudes with two time points separated by approximately 12 months on Prolific. Of the 331 participants who completed the initial survey in 2018, 262 remained active on the platform in 2019. Of these, 254 (76.74% of total baseline sample; 96.95% of active users) completed the follow-up survey, with a majority completing within 24 hours of the start of follow-up. Older participants and women were more likely to be retained. Overall, Prolific shows similar retention characteristics to conventional cohort studies with substantially reduced researcher burden.
Study specs
- Institution
- Deakin University,Misinformation Lab
- Discipline
- Behavioral Research Methods
- Year
- 2019
- Human Data Platform
- Prolific
- Source
- View Source Google Scholar
Peer Review & Critical Discussion
Potential Selection Bias in 2023 Cohort
The participant pool shows a concerning overrepresentation of users from high-income demographics. Looking at Table 3, we can see that 78% of respondents had annual incomes above $75k, which significantly limits the generalizability of these findings to broader populations.
Non-naive Participants Issue
I've noticed a methodological concern regarding participant naivety. Given that Prolific users often complete multiple studies, there's a real risk that participants had prior exposure to similar experimental paradigms, which could confound the results.
RLHF Applicability to This Study Design
The implications for RLHF training pipelines are understated. If we accept the authors' conclusions about preference stability, this has direct consequences for how we should structure reward model training. The temporal decay effect described in Section 4.2 is particularly relevant.
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