External Study Credit Granting with SoSci Survey

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 SoSci Survey):

  1. On your Sona Systems site, change the Study URL so it includes ?r=%SURVEY_CODE% in the URL. So if the SoSci Survey URL is:https://www.soscisurvey.de/test246388/
    then change it to
    https://www.soscisurvey.de/test246388/?r=%SURVEY_CODE%
  2. Having completed Step 1, the Study Information on your Sona Systems site now displays a URL labeled “SoSci Survey Exit Link”. Copy this URL.
    (e.g. https://yourschool.sona-systems.com/webstudy_credit.aspx?experiment_id=123&credit_token=4e48f9b638a&survey_code=%reference%)
  3. In SoSci Survey, add a Redirect page at the end of your questionnaire. Drag “PHP code” into the page content area in the middle so you have a “PHP code” area. Then put in a redirect line similar to the below. The false is needed to tell that the user is done with the survey to be marked as complete on SoSci Survey.

A few tips:

  • The integration may not work if your survey has a goToQuestionnaire() call in it. Instead, use a multiLevelDown() call and use the data option to transfer the reference.
  • In Step 1, if your SoSci Survey URL (before you add ?r=%SURVEY_CODE% to it) already has a ? in it, then add &r=%SURVEY_CODE% to it.
  • In Step 2, if you see Completion URL instead of SoSci Survey Exit Link, this could indicate you are using a university-hosted version of SoSci Survey and our system has not detected it’s SoSci Survey. In that case, please have your administrator contact us and we can update the detection code.