All of your rights and responsibilities as a participant are explained in the complete PIPER Policy document, which you should read before signing up for studies. Major points of concern for participants are summarized on this page for convenience in four major sections:
Overview of the PIPER requirement
Earning PIPER credit for your courses
Details of the Alternative Assignment
Strikes and the Compulsory Assignment
Overview of the PIPER requirement
PIPER is extra credit meaning there is no requirement.
You must be 18 to participate in PIPER. All research studies at the College require that participants give informed consent, and you must be at least 18 years of age in order to give legal consent.
Earning PIPER credit for your courses
- Go to the PIPER online registration website (see main page for a link) to find and sign up for research studies. You will be sent an email at the start of the semester to create your account with SONA. Keep track of your password.
- Follow the links to browse available experiments (see the video on the main page for a demo). Be certain to view the eligibility criteria because NO credit will be given participants who do not meet the eligibility criteria.
- Click on the appropriate button to sign up for studies on the day and time that you select. You will be sent an email reminder. You may cancel a research appointment without penalty in SONA (by dropping the session) up to 24 hours before the appointment time. A participant may cancel a research appointment without penalty up to 1 hour and 20 minutes before the session by emailing the experimenter. The researcher can cancel the session up to 1 hour and 20 minutes before the appointment. The researcher should notify you (via email) of the cancellation. Participants who do not cancel a session (according to item 6 above) and do not arrive at the study location within 10 minutes of the research appointment will receive a strike. Please see the section below on strikes for more details.
- You earn 1 PIPER credits for each ½ hour of participation. The research participant or the researcher both retain the right to cancel the session at any time for any reason after it begins. In this case, the research participant will receive the appropriate credit for the spent in the session (not necessarily full credit for the study).
- After participants accumulate PIPER credit, they must apply PIPER credits to a class in order for the faculty member to verify that the student has earned credit. Participants may apply credit to only one psychology class. You must allocate your PIPER credits to your class by the end of the last day of the semester.
Note: In the event that a participant shows up for a research appointment and the experimenter does not show, the research participant will receive full credit for the study. The research participant should first contact the faculty sponsor of the research study and ask for the credit. If the researcher is unresponsive, then the research participant can contact the PIPER coordinator (piper@tcnj.edu) in order to receive credit.
Details of the Alternative Assignment
The APA requires an Alternative Assignment to be offered to students who choose not to participate in psychological research. You can read the relevant section of the ethical code by following this link.
See your instructor for alternative assignments.
Strikes and the Compulsory Assignment
Researchers assign you a strike when you fail to attend a session without providing advance cancellation, if you are found to have misrepresented your eligibility to participate in a study (e.g., you say that you have a job to qualify for participation in a study of employed students, but you actually don’t work), or if you behave in a disruptive or disrespectful way toward faculty or research assistants during a study.
If you feel that a strike has been applied in error, contact the PIPER Coordinator at piper@tcnj.edu immediately with an explanation so that the Coordinator can investigate the situation.
When you receive three strikes, you are banned from further research participation. You will keep your earned credit.