Screener Best Practices Guide

We’ve added a new Screener Best Practices Guide in-app that includes tips on how to screen for the right participants and protect against fraud. 

We know setting up effective screeners can be tricky, but getting it right is crucial to securing quality participants down the line—follow these best practices to avoid “over-screening,” set up screeners that are more resilient to fraud, and improve completion rates.

You’ll see this guide during the initial screener building process before project launch, as well as in screener edit mode after launch—reference it anytime! Text version below 📄

Screener best practice guide

Tips to screen for the right participants and protect against fraud

‍Keep it clear and concise

• Before building your screener, identify the must-have characteristics of people who will be able to answer your research questions and use the previous Recruitment criteria step to cover any characteristics you can.
• To prevent drop-off, try to keep your screener to 10 questions or fewer and limit it to characteristics you haven’t already covered with Recruitment criteria.
• Keep questions “to the point” and avoid overly technical language and jargon (unless knowledge of it is a requirement for participation).
• Open response questions are useful for gauging communication skills—but try not to include more than one or two.

Make sure your logic checks out

• Organize your questions and utilize skip logic so irrelevant applicants are filtered out as early as possible.
  Example: Before diving into questions about how people use food delivery apps, find out if they use this type of app in the first place – and skip them to the end if not.
• Include all potential answer options to a question, and provide “catch-all” options, such as “Other,” “None of the above,” or “I’m not sure.”

Protect against fraud

• While it’s helpful to give a general idea of the study topic, avoid giving away the specific purpose or target audience of your research.
• If you’re looking for users of your company or product, don’t reveal what it is to applicants.
• Don’t ask leading or loaded questions that may reveal how to answer the “right” way.
  Example: Instead of asking, “Are you concerned about internet privacy?”, try, “Which of the following topics are concerning to you regarding internet use?”