Below you will find the most important rules for using SONA. Please read these carefully before starting to use SONA as a researcher. For any questions, check the F.A.Q. or contact proefpersonen@fsw.leidenuniv.nl

Accounts

• Only students and staff of Psychology or Education and Child studies at Leiden University are eligible for researcher accounts on SONA.
• In order to obtain a researcher account an e-mail can be send to proefpersonen@fsw.leidenuniv.nl, include at least your: position (e.g. master student, PhD candidate, Associate Professor), student number (if applicable) or ULCN name and university email address.
• Staff members with at least a finished PhD are eligible to receive a principal investigator account.
• We strongly urge to request only one account per Bachelor Thesis group, this will be registered on the name and e-mail address of one of the members. This member than should function as a group representative. The entire group should share this account and the representative has to make sure that important information is shared among all members.
• For all SONA researcher accounts only e-mail addresses issued by Leiden University can be used.

Study Rules

Study Description

• The list of studies will be displayed to participants in a randomized order, starting your title with certain letters or symbol does not make your study appear on top of the list.
• It is not allowed to use special signs or numbers at the beginning of the title of your study
• It is not allowed to use HTML in the title of your study
• Extreme use of exclamation marks is not allowed in the description of your study.
• Be sure to always note all eligibility requirements upon creating the study. Also specify disqualifiers and restrictions if necessary under the corresponding subheadings.
• Make sure the e-mail address of you and the principal investigator are up to date in order to facilitate students reaching out to you.

Code Ethical Commission

• Always fill in the Research Ethics Committee Approval Code when creating a study, without this code your study should not be activated.
• The expiration date should be the expected end date of the study, as mentioned in the Ethics approval submission. If needed, please contact proefpersonen@fsw.leidenuniv.nl to request study extensions.
• The administrator will enforce this rule by making the study inactive when the approval code is missing. This disables the possibility to recruit participants.

Rewards & Compensation

Credits and Money

• Researchers can reward participants with either money or credits for the course Academic Skills. For Money
• Monetary payments will take place outside of SONA. Therefore, the researcher should always choose for the option ‘credits’ when creating a study, even if there will be monetary rewards. If this option is not chosen, it will be impossible to grant students credits.
• The maximum monetary reward may vary a bit depending on the study type: standard computer tasks, or more taxing experiments such as psychophysiological studies or experiments with participants that are unusually harder to recruit. 
• The exact specifications for allowed compensation are determined by the Ethics Committees. 

  Rates as of November 2024:

  • Compensation is calculated per 15 minutes (rounded up) Standard behavioural experiments and tests (e.g. questionnaires):

    • Up to 15 minutes: € 2,50 or 0.5 credit

    • 15-30 minutes: € 5,00 or 1 credit 

    • 30-45 minutes: € 7,50 or 1.5 credit 

    • 45-60 minutes: € 10,00 or 2 credit

    • Etc. 

  • Behavioural experiment with external participants that are difficult to find within the faculty (e.g., participants with a specific cultural background,age group, or educational level): 

    • Up to 15 minutes: € 2,75 or 0.5 credit

    • 15-30 minutes: € 5,50 or 1 credit

    • 30-45 minutes: € 8,25 or 1.5 credit 

    • 45-60 minutes: € 11,00 or 2 credit 

    • Etc. 

  • Psychophysiological experiment and interventional studies (e.g., EEG, application of medication/hormone/pheromone, collecting DNA, cortisol, and other hormones, measuring heart rate, blood pressure, skinconductance, pain/itch or fear-induction studies): 

    • Up to 15 minutes: € 2,75 or 0.5 credit 

    • 15-30 minutes: € 5,50 or 1 credit 

    • 30-45 minutes: € 8,25 or 1.5 credit 

    • 45-60 minutes: € 11,00 or 2 credit 

    • Etc. 

  • Note that although this type of experiment justifies a higher monetary remuneration, the reward in course credits should still correspond to the amount of time spent. In this case, participants can be compensated for the higher burden of the experiment by a monetary bonus on top of a regular course credit reward.

  • Please note: Minimum compensation in case of non-completion of the experiment is € 0.00/0.5 credit for up to 15 minutes, and € 5,00 (1 credit) for 15- 30 minutes. This information must be included in the Informed Consent text and given prior to the start of the experiment.

  • Please note: There is a maximum reward per experiment of 8 course credits. The reason for this is that the course credit system has been implemented in the first-year curriculum as an educational element: research participation for credits is intended as a way for students to experience a variety of experiments. By using an upper limit to the number of course credits per experiment, the institute aims to guarantee that students obtain a varied experience with psychological experiments. If researchers want to perform studies that require longer participation than 8x30 minutes, they will have to make use of a monetary reward or a combination of course credit and money. Researchers are not allowed to reward more than 1 course credit per 30 minutes, as this will yield unfair competition between studies / researchers.

  • Please note: If you have experiments lasting less than 15 minutes, please try to combine several experiments so that participants spend approximately 15 minutes for their credit/compensation. Do not use short experiments with full payment as a selling argument to draw participants in your advertising on SONA, in flyers, or on social media.

  • Please note: If the nature of the experimental procedure requires additional compensation (i.e., performance-dependent), this compensation should be reasonable so as not to cause unfair competition. The need for additional compensation should be explained in the proposal.

Incomplete Participation

• Whether or not (partial) compensation is awarded in case of incomplete participation, especially relevant for multi-session studies, should be explicitly mentioned in the study description ánd in the information letter.

No-show Penalty

• If participants have indicated that they want to earn course credit with an experiment but do not show up for the experiment, researchers have the right to sanction the student. However, this only applies for Psychology students. The following rules apply to penalties:
  • Students should have received a personal (e-mailed) reminder from the researcher, not later than 48 hours before the planned test session.
  • In this invitation, the consequences of not showing up are mentioned and it is specified where cancellations should be sent.
  • The student participant has failed to cancel the meeting in the required form, that is, as an e-mail notification to the experimenter not later than 24 hours before the planned test session.
  • The penalty is registered as a negative earned credit equal to the amount of credits to be earned, with a maximum of 3 negative credits.
  • The penalty system is there primarily to stimulate students to adhere to their appointments. If a student has a valid and convincing excuse, it is only demotivating if you nonetheless impose a sanction. The application of penalties is under responsibility of staff members.
  • It is not possible to apply penalties when a monetary reward was chosen

Timeslots

• SONA works with timeslots in which participants can enroll/can be enrolled it is important to follow the following rules;
  • Grant participants their credits as soon as possible after participation, this avoids granting being forgotten by researchers.
  • Register a student as participated (or no-show) as soon as possible to speed up the timeslot completion process.
  • To maintain the earlier mentioned rules, it is advised to make use of the computers in the laboratory to quickly grant credits to participants.
• When participants are enrolled in a timeslot and they have chosen to receive a monetary reward it is mandatory to close the timeslot as follows:
  • Tick the participant as participated.
  • Choose to grant 0 credits.
  • Note in the comments that a monetary reward was given.

Privacy

• It is not allowed to include screening questions of SONA itself, therefore the questionnaire option in SONA is disabled. Criteria for participation should instead be mentioned in the relevant field of the study information.