Run longitudinal studies without the manual overhead
Trusted by researchers at thousands of organizations
Retention rates achieved on Prolific
Set up your waves once and participants run through automatically
Select your participants, create all your waves, schedule when they go live, and Prolific ensures the same participants progress through in the right order.
Know your costs and recruitment numbers before you launch
Use our cost and retention calculator to see how many participants you need to add to wave 1 to hit your target final sample size, and get a full breakdown of costs across waves.
Catch participant drop-off early
The live retention tracking dashboard will show you quickly if you’re not going to hit your final sample size. Send reminders to participants or increase study places to get back on track.
Participants are fully informed and able to commit
Participants can see the full study schedule upfront, including time commitment, when each wave opens, and payment. So they know what they’re committing to and when to come back.
Ready to run your longitudinal study?
Longitudinal study FAQs
Here are the latest updates to longitudinal projects, or read our related help center article.
Retention rates vary depending on your study design. However, researchers on Prolific have achieved stats like 90% retention across 30 days with 300 participants, 82% retention across 4 weekly waves with 2,500 participants, and 66% retention across 60 daily waves with 1005 participants. These were all achieved before we introduced the latest longitudinal project features, which will only boost participant retention across waves.
Our in-house research scientists have also written a paper and guidance article on what drives retention in longitudinal studies, which offers advice on how to estimate retention for your study.
Yes! Prolific’s Managed Services team would be happy to partner with you on this. Our consultants have years of experience running research in academia and different organizations — contact them here.
You can set up your questions in any third-party tool of your choice, from Qualtrics to a custom-built tool. Easily connect your studies to Prolific by pasting the link for participants, or you can connect using our API.
You can still run longitudinal research if using our API, however all the latest updates around longitudinal projects aren’t available yet via API.
The quality of our participant responses is often cited as the number one thing our customers love about Prolific. Find out more about the participant checks we run and how our data quality compares to other online platforms.
Use Prolific’s built-in calculator to figure out how many participants you’ll need to recruit in wave 1 to hit your target sample size. Learn more about how it works.
Our research scientists have written a paper on how to maximise retention in longitudinal studies. Read their top takeaways and the full paper here.
Yes! Longitudinal projects are designed so that the same participants automatically progress through your waves in the right order. Learn more about how it works.
