How-tos
Arrange money for participants
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First of all, clarify budget arrangements
Always arrange for budget to pay your participants, before you start participant recruitment, and make sure that you obtain approval in writing.
The money for the participants will typically come from your project, or your supervisor’s project – this needs to be sorted out before you start running. If you are staff or a PhD student, talk to Maaike Schoorlemmer. If you are an undergraduate or (R)MA student, make sure that your supervisor fully works out the financial arrangements with Maaike and the director of ILS.
Note that you will need to get permission in advance, in writing, from the budget holder of the budget your participants will be paid from.
The standard amount is 10 euros per hour, usually with a minimum of 5 euros for experiments shorter than 30 minutes (can be less if your experiment is extremely short, e.g. 3 euros for 10 minutes). Infants typically receive a book to thank them for participation.
Below we try to give some information about the procedures. Please bear in mind that the procedures are in constant flux and we are not necessarily updated when things change. If you find information that is not correct, or if you have more detailed information than we provide here, please let us know.
Decide on how to pay your participants
For experiments that take place in the lab, these are the options:
Your supervisor can ask an ILS secretary to order the gift cards. It will be difficult to know in advance how many to order, exactly – you will know how many participants you want good data from, but you will probably lose data from a few participants due to technical issues or whatever. It’s probably a good idea to order a few more cards than you think you will need. Note that you will not be able to give the excess cards back though, and that they do expire.
To give out the gift card, you enter the participant’s email address on the Yesty website. You won’t get confirmation, but a list of the email addresses you gave a gift card to does remain visible.
Paying participants with this gift card is the preferred option, because it is the most convenient (or least inconvenient) option, and you will only need your participant’s email address to pay them, no other personal information is required from them. You will, need to provide the participant’s email addresses, and perhaps also their names, to get reimbursed.
You as the experiment leader can (together with the participant) fill out a form to get them paid, if you are an employee (so a PhD student or a student with a TA contract can do this, but other students cannot). Go to the intranet page ‘Formulieren FCA directie‘ (Dutch only) and search for ‘Betaalopdracht binnenland (C4)’ – click on the link and it will take you to a form on topdesk. You will need to fill out a lot of information here (for instance the participant’s home address). NB: in the field ‘grootboekrekening’/’ledger account’, you need to fill out 435380.
ASC will send this payment request for approval to the budget holder of the WBS number your participants are being paid from. You will want to find out who the budget holder is, alert them that a barrage of payment requests are going to come their way, and agree on some sort of system so that they know the payment request is legit (maybe fill out something very specific in the ‘Description of costs’ field?).
After approval by the budget holder, ASC will pay the participant.
In the babylab, it is customary to give participants a book to reward them for participating. These books are bought from the lab budget; you will need to reimburse the lab budget for the books you use. Keep a record of how many books you use, with the participant’s names, and send this list, together with the WBS number for your project, to Iris Mulders by November 15 (so we can sort it out by the end of the financial year at December 1). She will calculate the costs, and ask the Coordinator Bedrijfsvoering for CDH (who manages the lab budget) to send an invoice to your project.
ASC will send this payment request for approval to the budget holder of the WBS number your participants are being paid from. You will want to find out who the budget holder is, alert them that a barrage of reimbursement requests are going to come their way, and agree on some sort of system so that they know the payment request is legit (maybe fill out something very specific in the ‘Description of costs’ field).
After approval by the budget holder, ASC will reimburse the participant.
Your supervisor can ask an ILS secretary to order the gift cards. It will be difficult to know in advance how many to order, exactly – you will know how many participants you want good data from, but you will probably lose data from a few participants due to technical issues or whatever. It’s probably a good idea to order a few more cards than you think you will need. Note that you will not be able to give the excess cards back though, and that they do expire.
To give out the gift card, you enter the participant’s email address on the Yesty website. You won’t get confirmation, but a list of the email addresses you gave a gift card to does remain visible.
You will need to provide the participant’s names to get reimbursed – we’re not sure that email addresses will suffice, but you can try.
For experiments that take place over the internet, there are two options:
For on-line experiments, there are platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk, Prolific, and Crowdflower that recruit participants for you and handle payment. If you are a PhD student or staff, you can ask for an advance at mijn.uu.nl. Pay the participants through the crowdsourcing platform, and submit the invoices for reimbursement at mijn.uu.nl. If you have more information (for instance about specific information required by ASC), please let us know! Your supervisor can ask an ILS secretary to order the gift cards. It may be difficult to know in advance how many to order, exactly – you will know how many participants you want good data from, but you will probably lose data from a few participants due to technical issues or whatever. It’s probably a good idea to order a few more cards than you think you will need. Note that you will not be able to give the excess cards back though. You will need to get proof of participation from the participant – a way to do this is to let your experiment generate a code at the end that they can send to you. To give out the gift card, you enter the participant’s email address on the Yesty website. You won’t get confirmation, but a list of the email addresses you gave a gift card to does remain visible. You will need to provide the participant’s names to get reimbursed – we’re not sure that email addresses will suffice, but you can try.