Screening Questions May Indicate Need for Better Survey Profiles
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Apr 27, 2009
If you have ever been invited to take a web survey, answered two or three questions about who you are or what your purchase intent is, then had the survey end abruptly, you've encountered a screener: a set of initial questions written to screen out respondents who don't qualify for the main purpose of the study. Perhaps the survey was looking for people considering buying a Pontiac to get their reaction to today's news that GM is discontinuing the brand, or perhaps the survey was looking for reactions of NFL fans who watched the draft this weekend.
A screener is great for asking about recent actions and attitudes-information that can't be kept current in a database. Conversely, a screener is lousy if it asks basic demographic or firmographic information, since such data can and should be used to profile email lists.
When writing your own questionnaires to survey your house list, if you find yourself asking respondents in a screener about such basic information, consider it a sign that you need to develop good profiles of your potential respondents. If you haven't before, then invite everyone on the house list to complete a profile questionnaire that you can use to target future research. If you do have a profile, but it is not meeting your current research needs, expand the profile: see Tips for Defining Community-Member Profiles (its advice is as relevant to panelist profiles as it is to community members).
Take care with using screeners when surveying customers. They've clicked through to the survey; you have their attention: skip them out to another survey instead or think about turning the screener into a branching pattern and asking other questions. Otherwise your respondents who don't pass the screener may get the impression their feedback isn't valuable.