Policy & Compliance Lessons from Panel Professionals
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Thu, May 27, 2010
As businesses seeking to provide a high quality product to their customers, panel providers invest in a range of quality initiatives. Further, since many of the most loyal panel customers are concerned about the replicability of surveys (especially for tracking studies), many panel providers take extra steps to ensure consistency in how surveys are fielded.
In our Lessons from Professional Panel Providers study, many organizations mentioned compliance with ISO 9001 in their ESOMAR 26 documents. Some panel providers are certified ISO 20252 compliant, which covers all stages and modes of survey research quality. The ISO 26362 standard, specific to access panels, is being investigated by many panel providers.
A key aspect of quality control is documenting existing processes. OMI, for instance, provided a detailed overview of their workflow:
Knowledge Networks similarly highlighted its workflow. Employees are trained to follow "a very detailed workflow process", so that the steps become "engrained in our employees". Proprietary software ensures compliance with the checklist before fielding a survey. The Knowledge Networks process is in its fourth major release in its ten-year history, each release shaped by a focus on continual improvement.
An important issue for regulatory compliance is that of surveying children. Panel providers request the consent of a parent or guardian prior to the survey, typically describing the topic of the survey. If the adult agrees that the child may take the survey, they are then encouraged to monitor the child while they answer the questionnaire. The legal age to research children online without parental consent varies by nation. No PII (Personally Identifiable Information) is included in the results of surveys completed by children. Depending on the countries the panel serves, panel providers follow trade-group guidelines for underage respondents from organizations such as BVM, CASRO, ESOMAR, MRS and SYNTEC.
What Panel Pros Can Teach Us about Policies & Compliance
Panel management provides an excellent framework for improving the quality of an organization's online survey research.
- Document research guidelines. Many in-house panels are created in a response to rampant Do-It-Yourself surveying, which is often done with little oversight or quality control. Develop detailed guidelines that all panel surveys should observe in order to improve the consistency and reliability of the surveys your organization is fielding.
- Embrace continuous process improvement. The initial guidelines should be looked at as a foundation to build upon and improve over time, as the organization comes to new realizations about what types of research work well for its specific customer base.
- Embrace legal and trade guidelines for researching underage respondents. Involve the organization's legal department or outside legal counsel in the creation of policies and processes for researching underage panelists. Alternatively, forbid such research altogether and exclude any underage individuals from the panel.
Want to learn more? For the full results of this study, download our white paper, Panel Management Secrets: Lessons from the Professionals, or view our recorded research webinar of the same name.