Here's a likely scenario that a lot of academic researchers find themselves in:

Researcher X decides to post a market research study to an online community. To qualify for the study, a participant must be a female between the ages of 18-24 who uses cigarettes daily and has a valid email address. This ten-minute survey, when completed, rewards the user with cash or gift card incentives. The researcher believes he'll get a good random sampling of results, because the online community seems highly populated with active users representing various demographics. Seems simple enough.

This is what really happens. The study gets posted, and certain users with a more entrepreneurial bent decide to game the system and take the survey using multiple accounts. Fake email addresses are created, false data is entered into the survey, and the particular user is richer by multiples of the intended reward. Meanwhile, the researcher's data has been compromised, and the responses of other legitimate users are wasted. It's no wonder that academic researchers are skeptical of posting studies online.

We here at SocialSci have experienced the above problem first-hand as academic researchers -- and while it was aggravating, it drove us to create a solution. When researchers post studies to our website, they can feel confident that SocialSci users are not gaming the system. We raise the barrier to entry by requiring unique user identification, ensuring an individual can only create a single account. Once the user is in the system answering survey questions, our algorithms allow us to track that user's responses over time, forming the basis for our vetting system. For example, if a respondent claims to be a male one week and a female the next, our system takes notice, notifies us and the researcher, and lowers the user's quality score. Thus we are able to help researchers target the demographics relevant to their study, while simultaneously eliminating bias from the sample. Our vetting system also allows researchers to create studies without ever having to bias a respondent by asking qualifying questions -- ensuring valid responses. No longer does conducting research surveys online jeopardize your results or grant funding!

Contact us and try creating a survey on the site today. As always, we look forward to your feedback.

Have you ever tried taking an academic survey? How did you find it? Were you attracted by the glitzy advertisements on the subway, or accosted by a messy undergraduate on the street, begging for thirty minutes of your time? Maybe you're a researcher, praying to the Research Gods that your sample selection will reflect the target population, doing wonders for your project and helping it get published in Science! With limited financial resources and strong pressures to publish, academic researchers use all kinds of methods to gather data, most commonly resorting to paper and mail-in surveys and rallying subjects into labs to complete computerized surveys. Though practical, traditional methods such as these have their own challenges, namely time, cost and poor response rates. Not so optimal!

This is where online surveys come in. Easy and quick to carry out, these surveys can be administered to a large number of participants in minutes, while eliminating the need to manually enter the responses into data-analysis software. On top of making the data easily accessible, survey websites like SocialSci also provide the researchers with analytical and statistical tools to analyze and process the gathered data immediately. All of this results in substantial savings of both time and money. Maybe the prospects of that article appearing in Science aren't so bleak after all.

Though online surveys have many advantages, they retain some of the challenges faced by traditional methods, mainly that of sample selection. Reviewers and readers are right to scrutinize the quality of the traditional participant pool, since settling for the readily available college age, white, male sample isn't really adequate. While the population connected to the Internet, numbering more than 75% of the US as a whole, may be more representative of the population at large, researchers still find it difficult to obtain the random sample population that they often require for their research. The sample selection problem could be solved if researchers had access to a central repository of users from which representative random samples could be selected. This is where services like SocialSci step in, providing researchers access to an exhaustive database of informed, consenting participants. Accessing less visible and decentralized groups has become easier!

Being academic researches ourselves, we have experienced the above challenges in our everyday research lives and have become frustrated with the status quo. Our motivation to make our own lives easier, while also furthering science helped us develop SocialSci as the solution. It provides both researchers and participants -on a global scale- a platform to engage with science and with each other. This commitment to science motivates us everyday to make our product better and make your experience with research and accessing science as seamless as possible. Enjoy our product, and let us know what you think.