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Thousands of scientific studies must have thrown away weeks of data because of a 56-second TikTok video made by a teenager.
The July 23 video is short and straightforward. It opens with Sarah Frank, a recent high school graduate from Florida and self-proclaimed “teenage author,” sitting in her bedroom and smiling for the camera.
“Welcome to the scrambles I recommend trying – part one,” she says in the video, pointing users to the Prolific.co website.
“Basically it’s a bunch of surveys for different amounts of money and different time periods. “
This video was viewed 4.1 million times in the month after posting and sent tens of thousands of new users to the Prolific platform.
Prolific, a tool for scientists conducting behavioral research, had no screening tools in place to ensure that it provided representative population samples in each study.
Suddenly, scientists accustomed to getting a wide range of subjects for their prolific studies saw their surveys inundated with responses from young women Frank’s age.
For researchers relying on representative samples of the American population, this demographic shift was a major problem with no obvious cause and no immediately clear way to solve it.
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