Sometimes, you may want the flexibility to reference participant metadata within the wording of an interview question.
Example use case:
For example, let's say you have participants from three different geographies - US, UK, and Canada.
You want to ask them what they think the biggest political challenges are in their country
You would like the question text itself to be able to reference where they live (i.e., the country - US, UK, Canada)
In the examples below, we'll walk through several options of how to reference participant metadata, using the example of participant country.
Default - no metadata referencing:
In this example, we do not reference participant metadata on country of residence. This is the typical way we would ask this question, but it's not customized to include information we already know about the participant.
Guide question: In your opinion, what are the biggest political challenges today in your country?
Expected AI Moderator Output: In your opinion, what are the biggest political challenges today in your country?
But what if we want the AI moderator to reference the specific country the participant is from? For that, we'll have to reference participant metadata within the guide question itself. Read more below.
How to reference participant metadata within a guide question
What if instead we want to reference their current country of residence within the question itself?
Option #1 (referencing participant metadata passed via URL):
If we want to reference participant metadata, we will need to have a participant metadata variable that stores information that we want to reference.
For example, let's say we have participant metadata labeled "country" which has the value of which country the participant is from (US, UK, Canada). We use a URL to pass this "country" information into Outset so that our AI moderator can reference it. Read more about how to pass in participant metadata to Outset via URL here: Tracking participant metadata with URLs.
Now that the participant metadata has been passed in, we can reference it within a guide question. By using the "superuser" feature of brackets [...], we can add additional direction to the AI moderator within the guide question itself.
Guide question: In your opinion, what are the biggest political challenges today in your country? [reference {country} in chat metadata when asking this question]
Expected AI Moderator Output: In your opinion, what are the biggest political challenges today in the United States?
Note: The AI Moderator does have some input on how it will phrase things. Here, we pass in "US" as the country variable, but the AI Moderator is actually able to interpret that it should phrase the question as "the United States" or "the U.S." or "the US." For this reason, we recommend doing some testing to check that the metadata is being referenced as you expect. See more tips for successful implementation below!
Option #2 (referencing participant metadata from Screener questions):
In Option #1 above, we passed in the participant metadata via URL. This requires having information about the participant before they begin the survey, and is most typically used with recruiting external to Outset.
What if you don't know the relevant information yet about your participants, until they take your Screener? In that case, you'll want to reference participant metadata via your screener question.
To continue the example above, let's say you set up the following screener question to find out the current country of residence for the participant:
Then, if I'm setting up my guide question and want it to reference that participant metadata, I'll want to use a similar set-up to Option #1, with one key difference.
Guide question: In your opinion, what are the biggest political challenges today in your country? [reference {Where do you currently live?} in chat metadata when asking this question]
Expected AI Moderator Output: In your opinion, what are the biggest political challenges today in the United States?
In the example above, you can see that instead of {country}, which is the variable name we created and used in Option #1 above, we instead use the actual text of the screener question in this wording. Because my screener question was "Where do you currently live?", I put that entire question in between the {} when I am providing direction to the AI moderator.
Tips for successful implementation:
Make sure to select "Pass metadata to AI interviewer" within your guide settings. You can access guide settings by going to Guide > General Settings, and then checking the box for "Pass metadata to AI interviewer". If you do not select this box, the AI Moderator does not have access to the participant metadata.
In this examples above, the wording of directions to the AI moderator is sensitive and should be exactly as above or as close to above as possible - with the exception of the variable name, which will depend on your data.
We always recommend testing when trying this sort of logic to confirm that the metadata passing is working as you expect. The "safest" way of framing this sort of question is writing the question in a way that will be understandable to the participant even in the off chance the metadata does not pass in as expected. (e.g., In your opinion, what are the biggest political challenges today in your country? is still understandable even without the passing in of the metadata).
Referencing participant metadata does require a few extra steps, but it can offer depth and flexibility to both your interview guide and participant experience.
Hope this helps, and feel free to reach out to our team at [email protected] or via chat with any additional questions!