Psychology.me for Research: researcher terms

Version researcher-terms-v1, effective 2026-11-03. These terms apply to a researcher account on Psychology.me for Research. By creating the account you accept them; the version you accepted is recorded with your account.

1. Who is who

You, or the institution you act for, are the controller of the data your study collects. Psychology Me Ltd (company number 16691896, 2 Frederick Street, Kings Cross, London WC1X 0ND, "we") processes that data on your behalf.

Separately, and as the consent page tells every participant, we are the controller for one use of our own: participants' answers, separated from anything that could identify them, go into our research and into the scoring of our tests. That is the only use we make of your study's data on our own account.

2. What the service is

A study runs on an instrument from our catalogue or on a form of your own items. Each study has one open link. You see counts, and you download item-level data in five formats: CSV long, CSV wide, a codebook in JSON, SPSS syntax and an R loader.

We do not review your study, and the service is not an ethics approval.

3. What you undertake

You obtain ethics or institutional approval where your study needs it, and you have a lawful basis for collecting your participants' answers.

Your participant information matches what the page collects: the fixed Psychology.me sentence, your own addendum beneath it, the background questions your study asks, and the instrument.

You put nothing that identifies a person in the study title, the addendum or the participant reference.

Catalogue instruments stay ours or their publishers'; you receive the data, not the items.

The seat is for academic and non-commercial applied research; paid assessment delivered to a client is not covered by it.

4. Instruments and what participants see

You choose per study whether a participant sees the full report anonymously, a summary of their own answers, or a thank-you page. The anonymous full report needs an instrument with a default norm. A thank-you study cannot run on an instrument with a crisis pathway. A form of your own is never scored and never produces a report.

5. What the export contains

Every item response with its timing basis and response state, the consent version pair the participant accepted, the reference you supplied through the link, and the background answers the study asked for: age band always, and sex, country of residence, education and occupation where asked.

It never contains a name, an email address, an account, an IP address or a browser identifier.

With the reference and the timestamps the file is pseudonymous, not anonymous; a rare combination can single a person out, and you treat it accordingly.

6. How long, and how a participant leaves

Study data stays available to you while your seat is active.

A participant can withdraw by writing to privacy@psychology.me; we then delete their answers, and that participant drops out of your export from that point. You may ask us to erase a study's data the same way.

Closing a study stops new participation and keeps its data; a study cannot be deleted in this version.

7. Seats and payment

A seat is for one researcher and renews yearly at the price shown when you buy it. A lab seat for five researchers is arranged with us. A pilot seat we grant you is free for the period we agree with you and carries the same terms.

Payment is taken by Stripe; we never see your card.

8. What we may do

Use pooled, de-identified answers in our own research and in building and publishing norms, as section 1 says. We make no use of your study title, your addendum or your reference values beyond running your study.

9. Availability and support

The service runs on our production system; we give no uptime guarantee in this version. Support is through the contact page, answered within two working days.

10. Liability, termination and governing law

Liability, termination and governing law are those of the psychology.me Terms of Service, which are governed by the laws of England and Wales.

Data-processing summary for ethics and IRB packs

One page you can file with your application. It states what Psychology.me for Research does with your study data, as of the version above.

Controller and processor: The researcher or their institution is the controller of the study data. Psychology Me Ltd, company number 16691896, 2 Frederick Street, Kings Cross, London WC1X 0ND, is the processor. For the pooled, de-identified research and norm use disclosed on the consent page, Psychology Me Ltd is the controller.
Data and data subjects: Study participants, 16 or over. Collected: item responses with timing and response state, the consent versions accepted, the age band, and the background questions the study asks (sex, country of residence, education, occupation), plus the participant reference the researcher's link carried. Not collected: name, email, account, IP address, browser identifier, date of birth.
Purposes: The researcher's study. Psychology Me Ltd's own research and the development of its tests' scoring, on answers separated from anything identifying; this use is stated on the consent page and has no opt-out within a study.
Where, and who else: Servers in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, run by our hosting provider under a data processing agreement. Error monitoring and first-party analytics on our own systems; no participant email is collected, so no email provider handles participant data. Transfers from the United Kingdom to the European Economic Area are covered by the UK adequacy regulations.
Security: Each researcher's data is kept apart from every other account's; changes to studies and forms, and every export, are recorded in a log for the account; data is encrypted in transit; access is role-based; the database is backed up nightly, with encrypted offsite copies.
Retention and erasure: Study data is kept while the researcher's account exists; nothing is deleted automatically in this version, and the researcher can ask for a study's data to be erased at any time. A participant withdraws by writing to privacy@psychology.me, which deletes their answers and removes them from later exports. The researcher's erasure requests go to the same address.
International transfers: Data is held in the Netherlands; see "Where, and who else".
Participant rights: Withdrawal and erasure as above; access and correction through the researcher, who holds the pseudonymous key (the reference).
Breach notification: To the researcher's contact address, without undue delay after confirmation.
Contact: privacy@psychology.me.