Often, you'll want to set up a Screener ahead of your interview guide. This can help you to gather information about your participants, and can be used regardless of how you plan to recruit participants.
There are two main use cases for screeners:
Disqualifying participants
e.g., we want to exclude participants who are not currently employed
Gathering additional data on participants (regardless of whether they are disqualified)
e.g., we do not want to disqualify any gender, but we want to gather information on how participants self-identify so that we can use it in analysis and/or the interview guide itself
Read more below about how to set up a Screener!
Setting up the Screener
The Screener tab has everything you need to ensure you're interviewing your desired audience.
Intro page
Create a title for the participants to see before they begin. Then, either create a custom welcome message or leave it blank and the standard welcome message will display.
You can also set up a custom message on the rejection screen (and a re-direct URL upon rejection, if relevant).
Screener Questions
Next, set up your screener questions. This is where you'll be able to collect your metadata. Answers extracted from questions in the screener are automatically uploaded to the "Participant Metadata" cell of the results table.
The format for these is very similar to creating interview questions in your guide. Unlike the guide, however, you can't prompt the interviewer to dig deeper on questions.
You can ask candidates three types of questions:
Radio buttons (select one) are good for yes or no questions, or those where only one option is applicable for a candidate.
Checkbox (select multiple) gives more flexibility to answers and participants can be required to meet more than one of these criteria to qualify.
Text answers can't be used to qualify candidates, but you can use these questions to collect metadata on participants
You can also mark the question as optional. You can still set optional questions to qualify candidates if they choose to answer it. In short, candidates can be disqualified if their answer is outside the parameters of the screen, but if they choose not to answer that question, they can end up passing the screen. This is determined by the parameters you choose for your conditional logic.
Setting up Conditional Logic to Disqualify Participants
Here, you set your screening parameters. You can choose one of your questions and set the parameters as is one of or is not one of to determine whether a candidate's answer qualifies them for the survey.
You can select any questions to be screening questions, whether they're optional or not. Your logic can be combined however you like. You can also choose to have no conditional logic and use all your screening questions to collect metadata on participants by leaving all the conditional logic blank.
FAQs about Screeners
Q: Can you end the screener early if the participant disqualifies?
A: No, we do not support ending a screener survey early. We actually used to support this, but stopped allowing it because ending a survey at a particular question can potentially encourage fraud (as participants learn what the disqualification criteria are).
Q: What is the difference between a Screener and a Quota?
A: You can set up conditional logic to disqualify participants within your screener (e.g., have one study for male and one study for female participants, with screener logic ruling out the opposite category). Or alternatively - you can have one study and set up a quota for half men/ half women. Learn more about options for recruiting subgroups here (LINK).
Q: Do you support branching logic within Screeners (e.g., only show a follow-up question if they answered a certain way for a previous question)
A: No, we don't currently support logic within Screeners, so all questions are shown to all participants
Q: Do you support "Other" (with text entry)?
A: We currently have an "other" (check box) option, but we do not support text entry for other. If you need a text input, you can use the Text entry question type.
Q: Do you have "grid" type questions?
A: No, we do not currently support "grid" type questions
Hope this helps with a basic intro to setting up your screener! Feel free to reach out to [email protected] or via chat if you have any questions.