Granting or denying payment

Conditions under which you can deny payment

The participant did not give consent, and, therefore, did not participate in the study.
The participant did not finish the study. You cannot deny payment if the participant skipped questions but finalized the study.
The participant failed an attention check.
The participant completed the task at an unusually rapid pace, identified as being more than 3 standard deviations faster than the average.
The participant clearly did not show effort for the study, even though you have explicitly specified the amount of effort you are expecting. For example, when explicitly asked to write a paragraph, they only wrote a couple of words, or for the entire survey, they chose the same point on a Likert scale.

How to deny payment

To deny payment to a participant, because of any of these conditions, keep their status as “participated”, but add a comment “Payment denied: {...}” with filling in the {...} field with the appropriate reasoning (e.g., “failed attention check”). This comment will be visible to the students. Please do not deviate from the wording “Payment denied” at the beginning of the comment. You HAVE TO add such comments if you would like to deny payment.

For incentivized studies, you can also arrange the incentive payment through the payment page on SONA.

Example:

You have a performance task in your research and you incentivize participants by paying 15 EUR for the top 10 best performing participants.
After your study is concluded, you identify the top 10.
On the payment page on SONA (same page as described above), for each of these 10 participants, you should enter “Incentive: 15” as a comment.
We will make the payment according to these comments, hence, please do not deviate from the format of “Incentive: {amount}”.
You have 2 business working days after the deadline to add the incentivized amount.

If your study has multiple phases (e.g., intake session + online surveys) where participants earn different amounts depending on which phase they complete, payment administration requires additional tracking:

Your responsibility: Track each participant’s progress and create an Excel sheet with three columns: (1) SONA ID, (2) Amount earned per participant, and (3) Completion status. Make sure to include dropouts and the amount they earned. Submit this spreadsheet to us so we can process payments accurately This ensures participants receive the correct payment based on how far they progressed in your study.

We will review the status of participants on SONA after the timeslot deadline.

NOTE: You have 2 business days after the deadline to review your data and deny payments. After that, we will begin processing payments and you cannot deny payments to participants thereafter.

We will initiate the payment process with the budget holder and the finance department to ensure that participants are paid on time. The budget holder must respond to the payment request email with everyone in CC to approve it. During the holiday season, it is the responsibility of the researcher/budget holder to ensure that payment emails are answered. This will be done after the deadline of every timeslot you have for your study.