What is a Screener Survey, and Why is it Essential?

Screener surveys are initial questionnaires that participants complete before they are considered for a research study. Essentially, they are the filters or sieves enabling you to capture the right audience for your research and exclude those who don’t fit your predefined criteria.

An effective screener survey ensures that your research study obtains valuable, relevant, and actionable insights from a target audience that aligns with your requirements.

How to Craft a Useful Screener Survey

Crafting an effective screener survey is an art, demanding a balance between asking clear questions that avoid leading the respondent to certain answers and ensuring the questions are well understood. This task may seem intricate, but with a few key strategies and principles, anyone can design a fruitful screener survey.

If you haven’t yet defined your ideal participant profile, refer to the previous chapter on identifying the right participants for your research before proceeding.

1. Know your Goals

Before you begin drafting your screener survey, you should have clearly defined objectives and goals for your user research project. These should be meticulously determined before you even consider writing your screener survey.

1. Identify Specific Target Audience Criteria

Consider your research questions and imagine the ideal participant who can provide the answers you need. This identification process involves defining your targeting criteria, including:

• Psychographics: Activities, interests, hobbies, and opinions
• Behaviors: Actions they perform regularly
• Demographics: Age, gender, education, income, marital status, etc.
• Geographics: Country, city, region, or vicinity to an area

Answering the questions below can guide you in defining your targeting criteria:

• What is the goal of your research?
• Are you in product development’s discovery, testing, validating, or post-launch phase?
• What is your research question?
• Who can answer that question?
• Who can’t answer that question?

If you are still struggling with this, revisiting the previous chapter might help.

3. Prioritize Behaviors and Psychographics Over Demographics

While demographic criteria like age, gender, race, and income might seem easy for your screener survey, these characteristics often have limitations. For example, a person’s gender or income may not influence how they interact with your product. Moreover, screening for psychographics and behaviors provides a more nuanced understanding of participants. It groups people based on their lifestyle, values, and how they relate to your product or service.

Nonetheless, demographic questions can still be useful in specific scenarios. For instance, if you aim to test accessibility with a diverse audience, including demographic criteria would be helpful.

4. Draft Precise and Clear Questions

Precisely worded questions reduce the chance of confusion and inaccurate responses. Avoid double negatives, keep the language simple, exclude industry jargon, and be as specific as possible.

5. Arrange Questions in a Logical Order

Begin with the most crucial questions to weed out unsuitable candidates early in the process. This strategy ensures you don’t waste the time of your potential participants who may not qualify.

6. Refrain From Leading or Loaded Questions

Leading or loaded questions can skew your survey results and potentially recruit the wrong participants. It’s crucial to ask neutral, open-ended questions that allow respondents to answer authentically.

7. Provide a Catchall Alternative Option

Always include a ‘none of the above,’ ‘I don’t know,’ or ‘other’ option for any outliers. This step ensures that no good participant is screened out, and no unqualified person is included to: AI Assistant<|im_sep|>A screener survey is essentially a preliminary survey that individuals undertake prior to participating in a research study. It consists of a select set of questions crafted to distinguish individuals who align with the study’s objectives from those who don’t. Think of a screener survey as a sieve; it retains people who meet your predefined criteria and filters out those who do not.

Constructing an Effective Screener Survey

To secure the right participants, you need to carefully design screening questions, a task that isn’t always straightforward. The aim is to frame questions in such a manner that they don’t nudge people towards certain responses, while ensuring they are clear enough to be universally comprehensible.

In this chapter, we present a set of guiding principles that can help you create effective screener surveys. If you haven’t already delineated your ideal participant profile, please refer to the previous chapter on participant selection before proceeding further.

1. Clarify Your Goals: Just as we stressed in previous chapters, well-defined goals and objectives are essential for any user research project. You should articulate your research goals well before crafting your screener surveys. If you haven’t done so, revisit the chapter on research planning for clarity.
2. Define Specific Target Audience Criteria: This involves considering your research question, envisioning the ideal participant who can provide the needed answers, and identifying the specific traits that qualify them for your study. Your targeting criteria could involve a combination of psychographics, behaviors, demographics, and geographics. Remember to ask key questions about your research goal, development phase, research question, and potential respondents to help guide this process.
3. Screen for Behaviors and Psychographics Over Demographics: Take note of your targeting criteria. If they involve demographic features such as age, gender, race, income, etc., consider if these are necessary. Instead, focus more on psychographics and behaviors, which offer insights about how people live, what they value, and how they relate to your product. However, demographic questions may be essential when testing for accessibility with a mix of gender identities, age ranges, and educational backgrounds.
4. Write Precise, Carefully Worded Questions: The language in your screener is crucial. Ensure your questions are clear, concise, devoid of industry jargon, and specific. Also, craft your multiple-choice responses with clarity to avoid confusion and inaccuracies.
5. Structure Your Screener Questions Correctly: Commence with questions that are most likely to filter out unqualified individuals, making the process more efficient for potential participants. Treat the process like a funnel, removing the most apparent weeds first.
6. Avoid Leading or Loaded Questions: Leading questions can influence individuals to answer in a specific way and skew your results. Similarly, loaded questions, which carry assumptions, can steer the participant towards a certain answer. Ensure your questions are neutral and offer a range of unrelated options as answers.
7. Provide a Catchall Alternative Option: Always include a ‘none of the above,’ ‘I don’t know,’ or ‘other’ option to account for any outliers. This ensures you don’t inadvertently exclude or include the wrong participants.
8. Include an Open-ended Question to Screen for Articulation: Use open-ended questions to test a user’s communication capacity. This can help you exclude individuals who are not expressive, saving time and money in your study.
9. Don’t Reveal Too Much: Disclosing too much about the purpose of your study or the kind of participants you’re looking for can affect the screening process and the effectiveness of your research. Be discreet with the information you provide about your study, from the title and description to your interactions with potential participants.
10. Set clear expectations for survey takers: It is essential to ensure that survey participants fully understand the purpose of the survey and their stage in the research process. The screener survey is a preliminary step, indicating they have not yet reached the final round. Communicate what participants can expect if they do progress further. If there are any crucial requirements or deal-breakers, such as non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), inform participants upfront. Additionally, explicitly clarify that compensation will only be provided after completing the survey.
11. Keep screener surveys concise: It is crucial to keep it short and focused to avoid confusion and prevent participants from mistaking the screener survey for a paid research survey. Some screener surveys become excessively lengthy, leading to participant confusion. As a general guideline, aim to keep the screener survey under 10 questions, ensuring a brief and efficient experience for survey takers.

Examples of Effective Screener Questions and Formats

Introduction:

Screener surveys are crucial for finding the right participants for your research. The following are examples of screener questions that can be used as inspiration and not a standard template for every circumstance.

Sample Screening Questions by Criteria:

1. Industry or Occupation:

These questions help screen people based on their familiarity with a particular industry or to exclude those working for competitors.

• Example 1:
• Question: What industry do you work in?
• Answers: List of industries (retail, IT, healthcare, education, etc.)
• Format: Single select
• Example 2:
• Question: Which category best describes your job function?
• Answers: List of job functions (marketing, accounting, engineering, product design)
• Format: Single select

2. Familiarity with a Product or Service:

These questions are useful for testing with novices, experienced users, or a mix.

• Example 1:
• Question: Please rank your experience with {name of product}.
• Answer: Range from expert to novice
• Format: Scale rating or single select
• Example 2:
• Question: Which of these tools do you use for work? (Select all that apply)
• Answer: List of software products
• Format: Multiple select

3. Frequency of Performing Specific Tasks:

These questions screen for users who regularly perform a specific task, or who used to behave in a certain way and then stopped. Define terms like often (every day) and rarely (once a year) for clarity.

• Example 1:
• Question: Please tell us how often you {name the task}.
• Answer: Range from often to rarely
• Format: Scale rating or single select
• Example 2:
• Question: When was the last time you {name the task}.
• Answer: Range from today to never
• Format: Scale rating or single select

4. Comfort with Sharing Personal Information:

These questions test a participant’s willingness to share personal information, especially if your study touches on sensitive topics like health, income, lifestyle, marital status, etc.

• Example:
• Question: This study will require you to share openly about {examples}. Do you agree to share honestly about these subjects?
• Answer: Agree or disagree
• Format: Single select.

Additional Guidelines for Medical Researchers:

Recruitment (pre-screening activity) and the screening process are distinct in medical research. Recruitment involves reaching out to research candidates and informing them about the planned study. This can be done without informed consent. However, the patient's consent requires gathering protected health information or obtaining medical records to determine study eligibility. Your screening script for interacting with potential participants and gathering information has to be submitted for Institutional Review Board (IRB) review.

Double-Screening:

Double-screening can be used to ensure that you’re getting the right people for your study. This typically involves a phone call to promising candidates. It is especially beneficial when the study is high-profile or has a highly specific research need.

Avoiding No-Shows:

People who promise to attend your study but don’t can waste your time. Here are some tips to avoid this:

• Collect the user’s contact information, including email and cell phone.
• Send reminder emails from an individual (not a generic group email).
• Provide participants with your number or the testing office number for communication in case they’re late.
• Send clear instructions on how to reach the venue.
• Highlight the importance of their participation to incentivize them to show up.

Additionally, consider recruiting a few extra participants who can fill in at the last minute if needed.