Compile online studies like mixtapes.
The open source study framework formr makes it easy to design complex, custom research — then share, remix and reproduce it with ease.
Free for academics who collect only anonymous data that will be openly shared · for sensitive, personal data we offer paid accounts
Our open source software is popular with researchers in psychology, economics, and other behavioral sciences. Its capabilities for feedback and customization using the statistical programming language R enable researchers to do more with tools they already know and use.
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Features
Live feedback
Formr can generate live and interactive feedback with the help of R. Use familiar graphing packages such as ggplot2, or r2d3. Feedback motivates participation, truthful responses and can increase retention.
R-integrated
Use R to enable complexity (plot feedback graphs, assign participants to blocks, or even run a large language model analysis of a participant’s social media feed to decide which questions to ask). To enable complex study designs, you can concatenate simpler components like surveys, invitations, R code, API calls, and breaks into a complex whole. Formr itself has a mature API, so it can be integrated in your workflows in turn, including in a MCP pipeline using your AI agent to help you design your study.
Keep in touch
Many researchers use our software to run longitudinal studies, diary studies, and experience sampling studies. We make this easier by automating push messages, emails or text messages. Send invitations and reminders according to any schedule you set.
Secure and open source
The core software, formr, is open source and hence open to outside vetting. Participants access the site via an encrypted connection. Our hosted solution, rforms.org runs on hardened servers in Germany with a BSI-C5-certified hoster, so that you easily comply with the GDPR. Participant data does not leave our servers by design.
Turn studies into apps
Formr makes it easy to generate an app for your study, if you want to stay in touch with push messages. With or without an app, studies can be filled out on mobile devices, tablets, and laptops. The layout adapts to match the screen. Because each formr study turns into a progressive web app, you do not need to publish your study to app stores to make it available on mobile devices.
Transparent and reproducible
Our surveys are built from simple, standardized spreadsheets and our study designs can be summarized in a standardized JSON format. Track version changes in these files on the OSF or Github. The standardized format enables reproducibility and transparency. The codebook package generates your study documentation from the metadata you already have automatically.
Learn from the community
formr has been used to run thousands of studies, hundreds of which have been published in peer-reviewed journals. Rely on the experience of other scholars and improve upon existing designs.
Support
We are available for consulting to prevent avoidable errors at the design stage and to recover from any technical problems that might occur.
Use cases
Diary studies & experience sampling
Instead of relying on retrospective recall, we should more often collect data in the moment. This is known as ecological momentary assessment or experience sampling. In formr, you can set any schedule — fixed times, random within time windows, or triggered by activity on someone’s social media feed, external events that call our API or triggered using phone shortcuts. Invite participants via push messages in an app on their phone, via text, or via email. Because everything is automated, you can easily scale your study to thousands of participants.
Lorenz-Spreen et al. · 2024
Lorenz-Spreen, P., Arslan, R. C., Kozyreva, A., Swire-Thompson, B., Geers, M., Herzog, S. M., & Hertwig, R. (2024). Real-time assessment of motives for sharing and creating content among highly active Twitter users. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/jf8w9
Scharbert et al. · 2023
Scharbert, J., Reiter, T., Sakel, S., ter Horst, J., Geukes, K., Gosling, S. D., Harari, G., Kroencke, L., Matz, S., Schoedel, R., Shani, M., Stachl, C., Talaifar, S., … Back, M. D. (2023). A global experience‐sampling method study of well‐being during times of crisis: The CoCo project. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 17(10). https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12813
Wieczorek et al. · 2021
Wieczorek, L. L., Mueller, S., Lüdtke, O., & Wagner, J. (2021). What makes for a pleasant social experience in adolescence? The role of perceived social interaction behavior in associations between personality traits and momentary social satisfaction. European Journal of Personality, 36(5), 787–808. https://doi.org/10.1177/08902070211017745
Bücker et al. · 2020
Bücker, S., Horstmann, K. T., Krasko, J., Kritzler, S., Terwiel, S., Kaiser, T., & Luhmann, M. (2020). Changes in daily loneliness for German residents during the first four weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. Social Science & Medicine, 265, 113541. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113541
Longitudinal studies
With formr, you can also follow the same participants for months or years. You can always extend studies, so you do not need to know which questions you will ask in future waves. Formr keeps track of who is due for which wave, sends invitations and reminders automatically, and carries data across waves, so wave 3 can ask about the new job only if someone reported job hunting, timed so the question arrives after they said they’d quit their old job. You can easily combine longitudinal studies with experience sampling in a burst design.
Schlechter et al. · 2026
Schlechter, P., Meyer, T., Kerneck, L. E., Schulze Mengering, P., Hoppen, T. H., König, M., & Morina, N. (2026). Comparative Thinking and Clinical Social Anxiety: Within- and Between-Person Effects in a Daily Ecological Momentary Assessment Study and a Four-Wave Longitudinal Study. Clinical Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/21677026261424180
Schubach et al. · 2016
Schubach, E., Zimmermann, J., Noack, P., & Neyer, F. J. (2016). Me, Myself, and Mobility: The Relevance of Region for Young Adults’ Identity Development. European Journal of Personality, 30(2), 189–200. https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2048
Intervention studies
Randomize participants to conditions in R, so simple, blocked, or adaptive randomization is possible. You can then deliver your intervention, drawing on formr’s other features, using cognitive tasks, gratitude diaries, information interventions, or whatever else.
Blomberg et al. · 2025
Blomberg, M., Oberender, L., Koster, E., & Brockmeyer, T. (2025). Transdiagnostic Cognitive Control Training for Patients Waiting for Outpatient Psychotherapy: Randomized Clinical Trial. JMIR mHealth and uHealth, 13, e65867. https://doi.org/10.2196/65867
Bolzenkötter et al. · 2024
Bolzenkötter, T., Bürkner, P.-C., Zetsche, U., & Schulze, L. (2024). Assessing the Immediate Effects of Detached Mindfulness on Repetitive Negative Thinking and Affect in Daily Life: A Randomized Controlled Trial. Mindfulness, 15(5), 1136–1148. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-024-02350-5
Feedback studies
Personalized feedback is worth money. It can replace small monetary incentives and even when you are paying participants, it motivates them to answer more honestly rather than quickly. Plus, it’s a great way to communicate your research. Don’t leave the personality feedback to the “what bread type are you” quizzes. Show participants where they stand on your personality scale, visualize their mood trends across a diary, or their results in an experiment — rendered live with ggplot2, plotly, r2d3 and all the powerful packages available in R.
Rau et al. · 2025
Rau, R., Grosz, M. P., & Back, M. D. (2025). A large-scale, gamified online assessment of first impressions: The Who Knows project. Behavior Research Methods, 57(3). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-025-02601-w
Schleifenbaum et al. · 2021
Schleifenbaum, L., Driebe, J. C., Gerlach, T. M., Penke, L., & Arslan, R. C. (2021). Women feel more attractive before ovulation: Evidence from a large-scale online diary study. Evolutionary Human Sciences, 3. https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2021.44 — example feedback graphs
Event history calendars
You can use formr to track events in a participant’s life, such as moves, relationships, jobs, and other life events.
Wieczorek et al. · 2020
Wieczorek, L. L., Tata, C. S., Penke, L., & Gerlach, T. M. (2020). Online implementation of an event history calendar with formr: A tutorial. Personal Relationships, 27(1), 176–208. https://doi.org/10.1111/pere.12305
Dyadic & group studies
Study couples, friends, families, teacher–student pairs, or entire social networks. Link participants to one another via an anonymous code, route them through parallel surveys, and use one person’s answers to tailor the other’s questions using our API. Or find out how a social network changes after a move.
Pusch et al. · 2022
Pusch, S., Neyer, F. J., & Hagemeyer, B. (2022). Closeness Discrepancies in Couple Relationships: A Dyadic Response Surface Analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 49(12), 1709–1722. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672221113981
Schleifenbaum et al. · 2022
Schleifenbaum, L., Stern, J., Driebe, J. C., Wieczorek, L. L., Gerlach, T. M., Arslan, R. C., & Penke, L. (2022). Men are not aware of and do not respond to their female partner’s fertility status: Evidence from a dyadic diary study of 384 couples. Hormones and Behavior, 143, 105202. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yhbeh.2022.105202
Schönbrodt et al. · 2021
Schönbrodt, F. D., Zygar-Hoffmann, C., Nestler, S., Pusch, S., & Hagemeyer, B. (2021). Measuring motivational relationship processes in experience sampling: A reliability model for moments, days, and persons nested in couples. Behavior Research Methods, 54(4), 1869–1888. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-021-01701-7
Reins et al. · 2021
Reins, L. M., Arslan, R. C., & Gerlach, T. M. (2021). Assessing Ego-Centered Social Networks in formr: A Tutorial. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2515245920985467
Reaction time tasks
Custom JavaScript lets you embed or cross-link reaction-time tasks and other dynamic paradigms using established frameworks like jsPsych, PsychoPy, or lab.js. In formr, you can combine these tasks with the scheduling machinery to run repeated experiments or link task data to ecological momentary assessment data.
Henninger et al. · 2021
Henninger, F., Shevchenko, Y., Mertens, U. K., Kieslich, P. J., & Hilbig, B. E. (2021). lab.js: A free, open, online study builder. Behavior Research Methods, 54(2), 556–573. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-019-01283-5
Schulte-Cloos & Anghel · 2023
Schulte-Cloos, J., & Anghel, V. (2023). Right-Wing Authoritarian Attitudes, Fast-Paced Decision-Making, and the Spread of Misinformation About COVID-19 Vaccines. Political Communication, 41(4), 608–626. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2023.2291538
Rónai et al. · 2024
Rónai, L., Hann, F., Kéri, S., Ettinger, U., & Polner, B. (2024). Emotions under control? Better cognitive control is associated with reduced negative emotionality but increased negative emotional reactivity within individuals. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 173, 104462. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2023.104462
And many more
People have also used formr for teaching evaluations, to collect interview data, to collect rating data of video or audio stimuli in the lab, linked it to mobile sensing equipment, collected voice recordings or ran economic games. Formr’s flexibility and reusability lets you build with these components or come up with your own. You can also integrate it in your infrastructure, to run an assessment center, to conduct patient-reported outcome monitoring in your clinic and send reports to therapists.
Ready to press record?
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