We are looking for volunteers for a study about how people in America manage their money.
If you agree to participate, we will ask you to sign up to a secure website where you can track all your financial transactions. There is no cost to using this service. In fact, we will pay you in return for allowing UAS researchers to learn from your everyday transactions.
Your financial information will be secure, protected, and confidential. As with all Understanding America Study surveys you take, the information you share with us is never linked to you individually. We have developed the website in collaboration with
Plaid, a company trusted by millions of consumers to connect their bank and other financial accounts such as investments or retirement savings, to help them manage their money. The data we access will include account type, institution holding the account, account balance, transaction dates, transaction amounts, and the type of merchant.
Your passwords and IDs will remain private. Plaid will never share your login IDs, passwords, or any other personal information with UAS researchers or anyone else. We at UAS also protect your private information. For example, when we write up results, we only ever publish tables and graphs that make it impossible to identify anyone individually.
Time required: Your participation in this study will require very little of your time. After you add your accounts, we will ask you to periodically review and update them as needed. You can remove any or all of your accounts from the study at any time without consequences. We also may ask you if you are willing to talk to us about your experience using the site. If so, you will be paid for your time and we will arrange to speak to you when it is convenient. You do not have to agree to do an interview to participate in the rest of the study.
To get started: You will simply create your own private password for the secure Plaid website and then follow prompts to log into it and add financial institutions with which you have accounts.
You will be paid for your participation, now and monthly: You will earn $[[]] for each financial institution that you add. After that you will continue to earn $[[]] every month for each active institution that you have added.
If you have any questions about this study: Please let us know. You can find out more information about Plaid here:
https://plaid.com/company. For other questions, just call our help desk at 855.872.8673 (9am to 5pm Pacific; Monday through Friday) or send an email to
uashelp@usc.edu.
I am interested in participating.