don’t have the mechanisms in place to prevent the same user from repeatedly taking the survey and skewing the survey-based scientific results.
SocialSci’s engine keeps track of user responses over time to prevent the same user from taking the survey multiple times, Noel says. And it will flag users who submit conflicting information across different studies. But at the same time, it has no way of tracking or determining the actual identity of a SocialSci user, so people’s information is safe and secure, he says. The site sends a text message as user authentication when you first sign up, but asks that you select a user name completely separate from your identity.
So what’s in it for the survey participants? Following a booming trend in tech these days, SocialSci is incorporating a points system and rewards component into its site. “Every single survey has some sort of prize attached to it,” he says.
Initially, that prize consists of being entered into a drawing for an iPod. But each survey also gives users points that they can accrue and redeem in a store in the SocialSci system for other prizes or gift cards. There’s even the option to use the points to vote for a particular area of research they’d like to see available on the site. It also connects users with surveys online that typically pay a small sum if taken in person; the company takes a small cut of those offerings.
“It enables this broad spectrum of how you want to be paid,” Noel says.
The site is also designed to adapt intelligently to a user’s survey responses over time. Noel likened the SocialSci engine to Pandora, the provider of personalized online radio stations. “As you start taking more surveys, the surveys you can take become more customizable to you,” he says. The company is also planning on feeding researchers the particular demographic of participants that they need.
SocialSci is first offering its service to researchers of social science surveys at the basic undergraduate level. As it grows, it’s planning on opening up to researchers at business schools, then medical schools, and ultimately pharmaceutical companies. As far as its business model goes, SocialSci is planning on charging for the service at the university level, based on the number of researchers a school has. “Our goal is to remove the burden from individual researchers,” Noel says.
On that note, SocialSci is also looking to make life easier for researchers once the results from their studies come in, by enabling the survey responses to be exported to Excel and other data analysis programs. The site also provides analytics of the survey results. “All the strong scientific data that they would have to export and labor over for a couple of days is all done automatically,” Noel says.
