Sometimes you may find that your study is not visible to participants, or is only visible to a few participants. This is likely due to a configuration problem. For example, you may have set prescreen participation restrictions too narrowly, so that only a few participants qualify. Or you may find that participants who should qualify for your study claim they cannot see it listed.

Check Study Configuration is designed to help you to solve these problems. You can find your study’s configuration page by selecting Check Study Configuration from the Study Menu dropdown options.

When you first go to that page, it will show both General Configuration and Specific Configuration items. The General Configuration items refer to general study configuration items, which are not specific to any participant. For example, regardless of which participant is involved, a study must have a timeslot available in order for the participant to sign up. If a study is a multi-part study, the system will check to see that there are available timeslots for each part of the study, and also that there is at least one available timeslot for the subsequent part to match up with the previous part. If you set up a multi-part standard (lab) study with specific day separation restrictions between each part, you must then add timeslots for the subsequent parts that are in the dates to meet that day separation. Check Study Configuration will tell you if one part of your multi-part study has no corresponding timeslots in a subsequent part (for details on correctly setting up timeslots, including timeslots for multi-part studies, see here).

The specific configuration refers to configuration items, which may prevent some (but perhaps not all) participants from seeing or signing up for the study. These are items like prescreen participation restrictions or an invitation code. This provides some information about what restrictions are in place.

If you need to know why a particular participant can or cannot sign up for the study rather than participants more generally, you may contact your site’s administrator. Administrators have an additional Check Study Configuration tool not available to researchers: Participant Qualification Lookup. Administrators can use this to determine why a specific participant is or is not qualified for your study.