Rules Files – Filtering participants into your study

Every participant registered in the Project Implicit participant pool fills out a common demographics questionnaire. The responses in this questionnaire can be used to direct people of certain demographic groups into your research pool study. You can restrict participant access to your study based on the following criteria:

• New participants (those that have just registered)
• Gender
• Age
• Ethnicity
• Race
• Previous IAT experience (reported)
• Political Identity
• Occupation
• Religious Affiliation
• Religiosity
• Education
• Major field of study or that of your highest degree
• Country of Primary Citizenship
• Country of Residence
• Current Postal Code
• Postal Code where you’ve lived the longest

To see the response options of each of the variables listed above, please DO NOT see the demographics.xml file, attached below.  It for the demo site.

There are several additional criteria that are not in the demographics file, they are"

• started_studies , the number of pool studies that the participant has started in the past
• previous_study_id , the session ID of the last study that the participant took. 
• user-agent , contains the browser type used by the participant.  Currently selects for IE 6 - 9, with values such as "MSIE_7".  If you need to select based on a different browser, let Andy know and he can update it

What sorts of restrictions can I have?

There are a number of different ways that you can use demographics to restrict participants.

• less than, less than or equal, greater than, greater than or equal, equal
• You can also combine/ modify the above with AND, OR, and NOT, so race not equal white and citizenship equal china for instance

Ok. I know what restrictions I need. How do I make them happen?

Restrictions are created by creating a rules file. This file is created by doing the following:

As you already know from the checklist, when your study is ready for production, you will fill out the Researcher Checklist form to let Sriram know that your study is ready to be launched. In this form there is a space to define participants restrictions.  An appropriate restrictions definition is below:

This study should only have the following people: Women over age 25 who live in the USA.