Basic review requirements

To accomodate the growing research community and meet the needs of different kinds of studies, external studies (Bring-your-own Study Link, Bring-your-own Meeting) will be expedited for posting, but must still meet some basic requirements in order to be approved. If you have questions about any of these requirements, please ask them on Slack.

In addition to the requirements listed below, you are also strongly encouraged to review the study guidelines that we use for reviewing internal Lookit and jsPsych experiments. You are also welcome to give and solicit peer review for your studies on Slack, and we recommend that all studies do this!

Study form

You must provide complete information for each of the fields on the study form, including compensation information and eligibility. Here is a detailed guide to each of the fields on the study form.

Inclusion/Exclusion Criteria

Our website strongly encourages inclusive practices for families that want to participate in research studies. Our goals are to support great experiences for all families and wide-reaching science outreach. Importantly, there can be a difference between (1) who you allow to experience your study and (2) who you include in your final dataset.

Thus, we suggest that you have inclusion criteria that are as broad as possible. In general:

  • Most studies on our website should only have age as a criteria (or, rarely, grade in school).

  • Due to logistics (e.g., the geographic scope of some ethics approvals), some studies may list country requirements.

  • When a study is about language in particular then it is allowable to include language requirements (e.g., “Because this study is about native language learning, we are only recruiting monolingual English speakers” or “Because this study is about knowing exactly two languages, we are only recruiting bilingual English and French speakers”). But studies should not list language in any other cases, and it is assumed that visitors to our site will know enough English to have a good experience with English-language studies. (Likewise, we have some studies where the study is listed in another language — such as Spanish — and then it is assumed that families signing up for such a study will speak Spanish well enough to participate!)

A guiding principle you can use is to consider what percent of your potential participants a criteria would exclude. For example, you might want to exclude children with “History of head injury” but this can almost certainly be done in your dataset AFTER participation has occurred; you would allow children to participate without any mention of this, but then at the end ask a question about head injury (and any other similar questions) and exclude the data from your dataset in whatever way you pre-planned.

In contrast, imagine that you were specifically recruiting children WITH a history of head injury. This would be appropriate to list as an inclusion criterion, because to recruit your sample without stating this you would need to recruit a massive sample and then exclude the vast majority of the children who had participated (and who did not have a history of head injury).

In short, you will only be able to list criteria on CHS when you make a strong case for it, including that it would be impractical/impossible to allow families to participate and then exclude their data from your dataset at the point of data analysis.

All of this means that you might choose to not list your study on CHS if you are going to turn away many families rather than allowing them to experience your study.

Paying participants

Note

You are not required to pay participants - some studies ask for volunteer participants - but you must clearly state what compensation is offered, including any limitations on who can receive compensation.

Beginning December 2023, studies are required to implement a visual check that study participants are acting in good faith (i.e. that a child of the correct age is present and the family is attempting to participate in the study as designed) prior to compensating them.

This is being required because we have experienced spam participants (e.g. people making many accounts and trying to get paid over and over again.) Our participant pool is extremely high quality, and keeping it this way by keeping bad-faith participants out of your datasets is a shared responsibility. Studies that don’t screen their participants teach the scammers that they can get paid by lying about their information on CHS!

To learn how to implement this requirement for different kinds of studies, and for more information about how to check for red flags (and green flags) to distinguish spammers from honestly confused families, please see the page on spam prevention.

Terms of use

Your study (including the entire experience that families go through after clicking on the external link) must follow the Terms of Use.

Below are some highlights from these terms that researchers will need to be aware of:

  • All studies must use informed consent procedures, and follow all other requirements for human subjects testing, as required by your institution’s review board. If we cannot find institution and IRB approval information at your link, your study will not be approved.

  • Researchers may not use email addresses or other participant information for any purpose other than conducting that specific study. (In fact, we recommend that you don’t collect email addresses at all, and instead use the CHS messaging system to contact families!)

Lab contact databases

You cannot use Children Helping Science to link to a page that just collects contact information from families that you plan to recruit to future studies later on. Links posted on Children Helping Science should be to a single, currently-active study.

  • Finally, under these terms we reserve the right to withold study approval for any reason. This rule is in place in case of unanticipated issues with a study where posting would have a substantial chance of creating a negative experience for visiting families or the platform as a whole. We will always contact you to discuss if we believe there is a issue of this kind.