I’m running an online experiment in Pavlovia using PsychoPy, which includes a survey (info sheet, consent form, questionnaires), an experimental task, and additional Pavlovia survey-based questionnaires. Participants are incentivised with a prize draw. At the end of the study, they reach the debrief page, where they can enter the prize draw via a link to a separate Pavlovia survey before pressing ‘Complete’ on the main survey. This keeps email addresses anonymous, but when participants don’t return to press ‘Complete’, their data isn’t saved.
I can see email addresses with no corresponding data, and only one full dataset has been recorded, while many appear empty. Pavlovia is set to ‘save periodically’ and ‘save incomplete results’, but it isn’t reliably saving responses before participants leave.
Does anyone know why Pavlovia might not be saving partial data despite these settings?
Is there a way to edit the post-submission message or redirect participants to the prize draw after pressing ‘Complete’?
Also, any suggestions on better ways to collect email addresses anonymously while ensuring data is saved?
Thanks for your response, I have tried Dasy-chaining from the Debrief page but it really looks like the data is not being saved properly, or at least not always. My experiment consists of a Pavlovia survey (info sheet, consent form, some questions), then a PsychoPy task, and then it ends with another Pavlovia survey with post-task questions and a debrief page.
I currently have two versions of this task -one running on Pavlovia directly, and another I’ve just launched via Prolific. In the Pavlovia version, participants are redirected at the end to another Pavlovia survey where they enter their email address for a prize draw. Based on your suggestion, I managed to set this up by daisy chaining from the debrief page to the email survey. But even then, Pavlovia often shows the responses as “aborted” rather than “completed”, and the overall response rate has been unbelievably low -way lower than in my previous studies.
Now with the Prolific version, I’m using the same daisy chaining method you suggested, except this time it goes back to Prolific using the completion URL. I ran a small test batch with 6 participants just to try it out. I could see them completing the task and returning to Prolific with their completion code and time -so I know they definitely took part. But on Pavlovia, all of them are marked as “aborted”, and when I download the data, only one empty file is recorded and no data at all from any of the participants.
I had noticed a lot of empty data files before as well, but I just assumed it was people clicking on the link and changing their minds. Pavlovia is set to both “save incomplete results” and “save periodically” ( am no using credits so this is fine for me). I’m not sure what’s going wrong.
I would love if I could save the data or at least the task data was saved reliably, even if participants don’t make it to the debrief or post-task survey.
Any suggestions on what might be going wrong or how to fix it would be massively appreciated!
Thanks for checking. If the completed URL is blank, as it should, be what could be the problem? Please note, data is recorded well for some participants, but not for most.
Your Completed URL in the PsychoPy experiment should not be blank.
Your completed URL in the Pavlovia Survey should be blank.
You can’t use a Pavlovia Survey completed URL if it’s embedded.
