Creating a New Online Study in Sona

  • When your account has been created, visit https://northwestern-linguistics.sona-systems.com/ and log in with your netID and assigned password.
  • Click "Create new study"
  • Select "Online External Study" -> "Credit"
  • On the study information page, under "Study URL", enter the URL of your web experiment and append your participant ID URL parameter using the string %SURVEY_CODE% to represent the participant's unique ID.
  • Using Qualtrics as an example, your web experiment may have a URL that looks like this:
    • https://northwestern.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_37ZsJox1kU5FypE
  • After appending the URL parameter, the URL might look like this:
    • https://northwestern.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_37ZsJox1kU5FypE?pid=%SURVEY_CODE%
  • On the receiving end, Qualtrics will read and store the "pid" URL parameters from each participant. The stored responses are now linked to to a specific participant. While this isn't typically needed for analysis purposes, it is often times useful when resolving technical problems or to help determine if a specific participant has (or has not ) fully completed the study.

  • The variable name "pid" is arbitrary. You may use any other variable name but generally speaking, URL parameters work best with letters and numbers. Avoid using spaces and punctuations in your variable names.
variable name acceptable?
pid yes
participantID yes
participantId yes
participant_id yes
participant ID no (contains spaces)
participant.id no (contains punctuation)

 

Was this helpful?
0 reviews
Print Article