We are looking for volunteers for an important new research study about how people in America manage their money. We plan to use this information to identify solutions that can help people lead financially healthy lives.
If you agree to participate, we will ask you to sign up to a secure website where you can conveniently see 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 a simplified version of 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 combined with other participants’ data, and never linked to you individually. We have developed the website in collaboration with
Plaid, a company trusted by millions of users to connect their financial accounts to help them manage their money.
Researchers will see only limited account information. By agreeing to participate in this study, you are giving UAS researchers permission to view your account history and activity, without seeing your passwords, or any indication of who you are, for research purposes only. Data is collected to be used for research purposes only. We will only see account type, institution holding the account, account balance, transaction dates, amounts, and descriptions (like you see on your credit card statement). Our information technology manager may be provided with access to the name and contact information associated with the account, but will never access, view, use, or store that information, as it is not needed for our research.
Your credentials (username and password) will also remain private. Plaid securely protects your credentials and will not share them, or any other personal information, with UAS or anyone else. We at UAS always follow strict procedures to protect your privacy and keep your private data confidential. For example, if identifying information such as name, address, or specifics about the transaction are ever included in the information we obtain from Plaid, we delete it before we store the data. No personal identifiers will ever be stored with your transaction data. When we write up results, we only ever publish tables and graphs that do not 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 your accounts from the study at any time without consequences.
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.
To get started: You will simply create your own private password for the secure website and then follow prompts to log in and add your accounts.
If you have any questions about this study or about how we are storing and using this data, 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 in this research study: