How to pair or link participants

[Likayolcu]

Hello! For a research study we need to match participants in pairs (such as mother–adolescent). We are planning to do this by having them write a nickname (for instance yolcu_mother or yolcu_adolescent) before joining the study, but I couldn’t find such a feature in the application. Is it possible for participants to set their own nicknames? Alternatively, is there another way to match or link participants within the system?

[SelinaDev]

Hi there,

ESMira does not have any builtin funktionality for something like this.

It depends on your requirements, but I think for what you're describing it would be enough to have a text item in a one time questionnaire, be it a separate nickname setup questionnaire, or as part of an initial crossectional questionnaire of demographics. Then you have one questionnaire where you have a nickname associated with a userID, and you can use that information to later merge that information into other questionnaires during data analysis.

An alternative that we used in a previous study is to have a setup questionnaire with a photo item where you instruct both participants to photograph the screen of the other participant, while they have the info page with their userID open. One of those photos would be enough to establish the link, but we asked both partners to do so for the sake of redundancy. As you have to evaluate photos, this does require a bit more work, though.

Best,
Selina