Faculty - Conduct Research

The research participant pool provides student participants for faculty in the Lucas College of Business to conduct research approved by the university Institutional Review Board.

Conducting Behavioral Research Using the Participant Pool

Students in several courses participate in research for course or extra credit. These are behavioral-science based courses.  If you wish to use the pool for your own research, please consider whether you can also include your students in the pool (so that supply can meet demand).  See Assign Research for more information.

The college has licensed a Web-based system from SONA Systems for recruiting participants to sign up for experiments. Descriptions of your research studies using participants from the pool are posted on this website. The system provides functionality for posting, recruiting, scheduling, and crediting participants for Web-based and laboratory-based studies.

Approximately 1000 participant hours are available each semester, and hours will be distributed among researchers based upon requested need, with priority given to requests submitted by the deadline. If requested hours exceed the number available, hours will be equally distributed.

After the 12th week in the semester the pool will open to all researchers who want to run a study irrespective of how many hours they have already used (i.e., you must finish data collection for your studies by the 12th week of the semester to be guaranteed the number of hours you were allocated).

How to Use the Participant Pool

Researchers affiliated with the LCoB who wish to use these resources should complete the following steps:

  1. Obtain IRB approval for the research
  2. Respond to the survey sent by Elizabeth Mullen at the beginning of each semester to request participant hours.  The survey will ask you to provide information about the length of the study, how many participants you need, and whether the study is online or in-person.  If you missed the survey at the beginning of the semester, you can email a request for participant hours to Elizabeth Mullen, the pool coordinator and your request will be accommodated if there are remaining participant hours.
  3. After creating your SONA account, post the study on the College of Business SONA Systems web site so students can sign up to participate.  Online studies that are less than 30 minutes in duration are worth 0.5 credits.  In-person studies that are less than 30 minutes in duration are worth 1 credit.
  4. Get approval for the study from the coordinator.
  5. Make sure online studies ask for SONA IDs (or program qualtrics with embedded data so that it pulls this information for you).
  6. Credit students who have participated in the study so they can receive course credit.  

Need to learn how to use SONA as a researcher? Here is a video tutorial.