How can we set up a study so that a certain number or percentage of participants fall within a certain category? For that you'll want to try out quotas!
Video Overview
💡TIP: Population-wide quotas are easier to fill and recommended for studies that don't have a requirement for nested quotas. Depending on how you recruit, you may be charged more as you disqualify more participants, which is important to keep in mind as you write more complex logic with Screeners and Quotas. Read more about recruitment and screen-out costs here (LINK).
How to set up quotas
To set up quotas, begin by navigating to the "Screener" tab in your study. Once there, you'll need to set up your screener (you can read more about that here!)
After setting up your screener, within the Screener page, click on "Edit quotas" on the righthand side of your screen.
You'll be prompted to enter the target number of participants to meet your quota. Enter the total number of participants here. You'll have a chance to divide the quotas by question later.
Next, you'll need to select either "Population-wide quotas" or "Nested quotas."
Population-wide quotas: Quotas do not intersect across sub-groups and instead apply across the population as a whole.
As an example, let's pretend we have a screener asking Age group in Question #1 and "Do you drive?" in Question #2, and you want to recruit 30 people.
Population-wide quotas can be based on one screening question or multiple. In the screenshot below, you can see that we would be setting two quotas - we want 1/3 of our participants in each age group, and 1/2 in each of the "Yes/No" groups for "Do you drive?"
For our results, exactly half of the participants recruited will be drivers, and half will not. However, we have no guarantees about the intersection of the response between these two questions (age group X driver status). Of the participants, 50% will be drivers and 33% will be age 16-40, but it's not guaranteed that 33% of the Drivers will age 16-40. You could end up with 10 people aged 41-70 driving and only 5 people aged 16-40 or 71+ driving each.
This could be fine depending on your research goals, but if you want to make sure you have specific numbers of people in subgroups of age group X driver status, you would need a nested quota.
Nested quotas: Subsets are limited and a strict quota is maintained for each subset determined by the percentages you provide. This means that you are guaranteed to have exactly 5 drivers aged 16-40, 41-70, and 71+ each; and exactly 5 non-drivers aged 16-40, 41-70, and 71+ each if you are looking for an even split.
If you selected nested quotas, it will default to an even split, but you will have the opportunity to adjust the splits in the same way you can adjust the splits with population-wide quotas.
Can I edit my quotas later after launch?
Yes, if you pause your study, you can update your quotas later! This is particularly helpful when you're not sure yet how hard it may be to recruit certain subgroups.
For example, let's say originally you wanted responses from 10 people in the age 65+ group, but recruitment is very slow for that category and you see that's not realistic because you've only recruited 1 person so far. You can then pause your study and edit the quotas (e.g., reducing from 10 to 3 for the age 65+ category), and set it back to live again.
Note that you can only reduce a quota if it hasn't been met yet (i.e., you can't say 10 people age 65+ and then change it to 3 if you already have 5 completed).
If you want to fully remove a quota, you can click the "trash" icon next to the quota.
A few final notes on quota implementation:
Quotas must add up to 100%, and you must give a discrete percentage to every group you want a quota for
Another method to implement quotas is to make different studies for each relevant sub-group (e.g., Study #1, which recruits 50 males, and a copy of that named Study #2, which recruits 50 females). Feel free to set up your studies like that if it's easier for your team! Read more about these two different methods for setting up quotas here (LINK).
You're all done! Quotas are set and you're ready to run your study.