Managing Sessions

What are sessions?

Sessions represent individual rounds of recruitment for a single FindingFive study. They aren't standalone entities but are always tied to a study.

When launching a new session, you can specify various details—such as recruitment methods, compensation, participation timing, and whether to collect participant emails—to tailor the session to your needs. Sessions are managed independently and are organized by study, giving you the flexibility to conduct your research exactly how you want.

Why both studies and sessions?

Studies define your entire research experiment using the Study Grammar, while sessions represent separate rounds of recruitment within that study.

This separation offers several advantages. For instance, you can run a pilot session to test your study before committing to full-scale recruitment or try different compensation strategies—such as offering course credits to one group and cash rewards to another—for the same study. Additionally, if some participant data is unusable, you can easily run follow-up sessions to fill in the gaps. FindingFive automatically organizes sessions by study, ensuring you can always access all the data for a given experiment even if recruitment is split across multiple sessions.

Once a session is launched, what kinds of changes can I make?

After launching a session, you can adjust several recruitment parameters. You can extend the session's duration to allow more time for recruitment, increase the number of requested participants, award bonuses to participants who complete the session, nullify participation records to let certain participants try again, or even end the session manually.

Keep in mind that launching a session creates a frozen copy of your study. Any changes made in the study editor after launching a session will not affect that session, but they will apply to any future sessions you start.

What can I do if my session ends before recruiting enough participants?

You can launch another session of the same study and recruit however many participants you need! Your session details will even be saved for you so that you can quickly and easily set up a nearly identical session with only the target number of participants changed.

Why do I have to preview my entire study before launching a session?

Previewing your entire study before launching a session is essential to ensure everything runs as expected. This step helps you catch any errors or issues before participants are recruited.

You may also be prompted to preview your study again when we update our Study Grammar (usually once or twice a year). Although we strive to maintain compatibility with previous versions of the Study Grammar, updates might introduce changes that could affect your study. A full preview allows you to verify that all components are functioning correctly.

I fixed a typo in my study after launching a session. Do I need to launch a new session?

Yes, you do. When you launch a session, a frozen copy of your study is created, meaning any subsequent changes—such as fixing a typo—won't affect the active session.

To ensure that your fixes are applied, you need to end the current session and launch a new one.