External Study Credit Granting with Gorilla

Gorilla is a cloud-based research platform that allows researchers and students to quickly and easily create and deploy behavioral experiments online. The basic tools include a questionnaire builder, a task builder for displaying and collecting a wide range of stimuli and responses, and an experiment builder, with a JavaScript code editor allowing users to program their own tasks. There are also advanced tools for consumer research, 2D games, and interactive multiplayer studies.

While these instructions refer to “credit granting”, they work for both credit and paid studies. For paid studies, participation will be marked (instead of credit granted) just like with any other paid study.

Here are the basic steps, which are subject to change (since the product is controlled by Gorilla):

  1. On your Sona Systems site, change the Study URL so it includes ?external_id=%SURVEY_CODE% in the URL, if it is not already there.
  2. Login on https://gorilla.sc/login. Then click on the experiment that you want to link to Sona. Click on Recruitment (see below) and then Change Recruitment Policy.
  3. Click on the Recruitment Service tab on the Change Recruitment Policy page (see below). Select Sona, then, press OK.
  4. The URL to be used should be generated on the page. Place this in the Study URL field in your Sona study.
  5. For the return URL, you need to put it in the Finish node of the tree in Gorilla. To do this, first click Edit, and then click the Finish node, and then copy the Gorilla Onward URL from the Study Information page on the Sona site and paste into the Onward URL field in Gorilla. The URL you paste in should not contain &survey_code=XXXX at the end of it.
  6. Save those changes, and then click the green Commit button to upload those changes. Now you should be able to start the experiment from Sona, do the trials, and then be redirected back.

If you need further information, you can stay logged on and go to the Gorilla support page: https://support.gorilla.sc/support/launching-your-study/recruitment-policies#sonasystems