Your first study

This page walks you through building a small study from start to finish. By the end you'll have sample people and posts, and a link you can open to go through the study as a participant would. Nobody else can reach it.

You need to be signed in to the admin app. On hosted Truman that's app.truman-research.org/admin. If your lab hasn't applied yet, do that first: see Your lab on hosted Truman. You don't have to wait for approval, though. Everything on this page works while your lab is waiting.

1. Start the study

1. On the Studies page, press New study.
2. Fill in Title. Only researchers see it.
3. Fill in Link name, using lowercase letters, numbers, dashes, or underscores. Participants join at /join/ followed by this name. It can't change later, so choose something a participant could see without learning what the study is about.
4. Under What kind of platform is it?, pick a card. Each shows a small sample of its posts. If you're unsure, open Help me decide. The kind can't change once the study starts.
5. Under Where do you want to start?, choose Sample content for the kind you picked. It copies in made-up people, posts, and pictures, and a hello that arrives as a message, all of which you can change or delete. On hosted Truman the same list has the example studies, if you'd rather start from a finished one.
6. Under How are people assigned to conditions?, choose Uniform or Blocked. Blocked keeps the group sizes close together. Either is fine for now.
7. Leave Draft from a brief empty, and press Start the study.

You land in the builder, looking at the feed as a participant would see it.

2. Change something

The builder is where you'll spend most of your time, so it's worth trying a few edits to see how it behaves.

1. Click the text of any post and type. It saves when you click away. The top of the page says All changes saved when it has.
2. Under a post, open Details to change who wrote it, when it appears, and how many likes it has.
3. Move the slider at the top to see the feed at a later time in the study.
4. Press Cast to see the people. Press Add a person to add one, then Back to the feed.
5. Use New post here to write a post for someone in the cast.

If you make a mistake, open Recent changes and press Undo.

3. Write the consent page

1. Press Settings.
2. Scroll to Study flow. The first step is Consent, with a box of Page text.
3. Replace the placeholder with a sentence or two for now. Before a real launch, this is where the text your IRB approved goes.
4. Press Save changes on that card.

4. Save a version

So far you've been working in a draft. A draft is where you work, and a version is a frozen copy that participants can be given.

1. Go Back to the feed and press Save as new version.
2. Read what it tells you. If anything needs fixing first, it's listed there.
3. Press Save version.

Participants don't see a saved version until you launch it. You're taken back to the Studies page, where the version is listed under your study.

5. Go through it yourself

1. On the Studies page, find Version 1 under your study.
2. Pick a condition in the dropdown beside Try as a participant, then press the button.
3. Press Open as a test participant. A new tab opens on the study.
4. Go through it: agree to the consent page, make a profile, and scroll. Like something. Write a comment.

That link is the one to send yourself. You're a test participant, so nothing you do ends up in the study's data.

What to do next

From here, you can go in a few directions:

• Press Edit a copy of version 1 on the Studies page to go back to building. Saving again makes version 2.
• Add a second condition and limit a comment to it. See Conditions.
• Make someone in the cast reply to what the participant writes. See Making things happen.
• When the study is ready for real people, see Running a study. A lab on hosted Truman has to be approved before it can launch.

If you'd like to start from spreadsheets or from a folder of files, see Posts and the cast and Studies as files.