Participant Tracking Sheet Style Guide
Save yourself the inconvenience of going back later to fix things by following this guide!
When you name your subjects, there are 3 different locations that have to match in their names:
The participant database with the par
The eyetracker's results folder
All 3 of these locations need to match in order to make reading in data about the participants as simple as possible. As of November 2019, these 3 locations may have different naming conventions. Here's how we're going to handle things going forward:
Naming your first subject
Each study in the lab is known by its name e.g. VNA or Plearn. Your subject IDs should start with two salient lowercase letters from this name, followed by a 2-digit ID number.
Example: Your study is named Example. Your first subject will therefore be ex01.
The same exact name should be used when the eyetracker prompts you to name your subject and when you log your participant in the participant tracking sheet.
Consistency in naming is absolutely key
Edge Cases
What if I'm running both babies and adults on the same eyetracking study? How do I differentiate them?
Babies should be named as described above. Adults should be differentiated as follows:
On the eye-tracker, you should add an "a" after the subject's number. e.g. ex01a
On the participant tracking sheet, you should make a new tab to keep track of the adults and name it whatever your study name is with an added A e.g. ExampleA
What if I'm running two waves of participants and I want to differentiate them?
Your first wave can be named as described above. Your second wave should be differentiated by adding a "_wave#" to the end of the subject ID e.g ex01_2 for the first participant in the second wave.
The above would therefore combine as follows: if you're running your second wave of adult participants on Example, your first subject's number would be ex01a_2
What if the eyetracker crashes and I run the same participant again? What should I name the new file?
In this case, end your subject ID with "b" for the second round. The rest of the subject ID should be identical to how it was when you ran it the first time.
If all 3 of our above edge cases happen at once, then the subject ID would look like this: ex01a_2b
What if I'm running babies with sensory impairments and typically developing kids on the same study?
This will work similarly to how it works with tagging adults, where each population will get its own 1-letter tag after the number to describe that subject.
Example:
typically developing children: t
children with hearing aids: h
blind children: b, etc.
For studies running different populations of babies, a readme needs to be put in the eyetracking folder on the host computer in the eyetracking room explaining what all the letters correspond to.
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