Meet Sherry, one of our nearly 1000 StudyResponse incentive winners. Sherry won a $50 gift certificate to Amazon.com and you can see the books she purchased with her gift certificate. Sherry has given us special permission to use her photograph on this site. The StudyResponse project keeps all participant information confidential.

All StudyResponse studies offer at least one random-draw incentive for participation and many studies have more than one incentive.  Most incentives range between $50 and $250, and most are gift certificates for merchandise at online vendors such as Amazon.com. International participants may choose to receive gift certificates from Amazon.uk, Amazon,de, Amazon.fr or another international Amazon site. Incentives are funded by the academic researchers who use StudyResponse for their research, but are administered by the StudyResponse project at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. Selection of winning research participants is based on a seeded random number selection among all respondents who elected to participate in a study within one week of the final recruitment message. No purchase is ever necessary for participation in any random draw conducted by StudyResponse.

StudyResponse has been awarding study incentives to research participants since January 2004. In the beginning we awarded only a few incentives a month. Now we routinely award twenty or more prizes each month. In July 2006, we awarded 38 prizes in the range of $50 to $144 and a total value of $2133. As of the end of 2006 we have awarded nearly 1000 incentives with an accumulated value in excess of $53,000. We now have winners from almost every U.S. state plus the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Estonia, Kuala Lumpur, India, Philippines, and New Zealand.

Because the incentives are mainly awarded on the basis of a random draw, there is no way for us to guarantee that every StudyResponse panelist will be selected to receive an incentive. There are a few things you can do, however, to make sure that you maximize your chances of being a winner:

1. Check your email account at least once a week. Studies are typically administered in one week increments, and if you don't check your email every week you may miss an opportunity to respond to a study.

2. If you like to procrastinate (and who doesn't?), make a careful note of whether a study will provide a reminder. Some studies do, in which case you'll have another chance to respond in one week. Other studies have no reminder, and will close after a week. Our email invitation message to you always spells this out.

3. If you receive an invitation from us to take a brief survey assessing your eligibility for a future study, take it! Even if you are not eligible for the future study, you may obtain an incentive from one of these eligibility assessments.

4. Our research ethics agreements ensure that you are never obligated to participate in a study. If, however, you receive many invitations from us to participate and you never respond to any of them, it is likely that our system will decide that your email address is dead or that our messages to you are ending up in the junk mail box.

5. If you decide to respond to a study, do so to the best of your abilities. Too much missing data in a survey makes your response unusable to the researchers. Researchers also have sophisticated ways of detecting junk data. If your responses to a survey are bogus or you leave large parts of the survey blank, your participation in the study will be wasted.

Here's just a small sample of recent winners:

$35 Amazon Gift Certificate: Janie B. (Canada)
$35 Amazon Gift Certificate: Brad B. (IN)
$35 Amazon Gift Certificate: Stacy P. (OH)
$40 Amazon Gift Certificate: Cindy W. (WA)
$45 Amazon Gift Certificate: Aaron U. (WI)
$45 Amazon Gift Certificate: John G. (IL)
$45 Amazon Gift Certificate: Marsha K. (Canada)
$45 Amazon Gift Certificate: Kate D. (Canada)
$45 Amazon Gift Certificate: Chhann H. (GA)
$50 Amazon Gift Certificate: Allan S. (NB)
$60 Amazon Gift Certificate: Roberta C. (NY)
$90 Amazon Gift Certificate: Kathryn K. (Canada)
$53 Amazon Gift Certificate: Wes G. (Phillipines)
$53 Amazon Gift Certificate: Diego B. (VA)
$53 Amazon Gift Certificate: Kristin G. (Canada)