Adding screening questions

Adding screening questions at the beginning of your study makes sure that you only receive responses from participants who meet certain criteria. Screening questions come in handy in a number of situations.

You can add multiple screening questions to your study to help you get the responses you need. Keep in mind that the more screening questions you add, the more criteria your participants need to meet in order to take your study.

We recommend including a screener as an extra check to make sure participants are still a good fit for your study. For example, their circumstances may have changed since they were recruited, and their profiles may not reflect these updates.

On the Recruit tab of the study setup page, you'll have the option to choose your participant source:

After selecting your participant source, you'll then be able to add screening questions.

Under Optimal Panels, you'll first Create a new profile and then click on + Add screening question.

Alternatively, after selecting the Send a link to your list option, you'll see a new tab appear called Screening questions.

Click to add screening questions and select the appropriate question type in the right panel. Type your question into the question box.

There are two options available:

Multiple-choice question:

This is the option we’d encourage you to use.

These are good to hide the intention of your study so participants can’t guess what the study is about and provide whatever answer they think will get them through to the next question.

Ideally, a checkbox screener would have one answer that aligns with your study, and lots of answers that are irrelevant to your study. Depending on your screener question, it doesn’t matter how many of the irrelevant answers participants select.

We recommend including the answer ‘none’ or ‘none of the above’ to eliminate participants selecting all answers.

Single-choice question:

This is a button that a participant can click to ‘check’ or select. The participant can only select one option.

If you'd like to duplicate or delete a screener question, click on the three dots to the top right of the question or in the left panel.

Your screening questions must have at least 1 correct response available so the correct participants can move through to the study. Your screening questions also must have at least 1 incorrect response that will reject some candidates. In other words, you cannot launch a study with all correct responses or all incorrect responses.

To select the response(s) that will reject your candidates, simply select “Reject” in the drop-down for all that apply.

Rejection Message:

You can choose to provide your rejected candidates with a rejection message. This is the default option when you add a screening question to your study.

There is already a default message provided in the rejection message text box. This can be edited by editing the text in the box provided.

Rejection URL

Alternatively, instead of being shown the rejection message, rejected candidates can be redirected to a Rejection URL of your choice by filling in the “Rejection URL” box.

Once you’ve completed the rest of the set up for your study, have a quick preview to check that it’s all working correctly.

Once you’ve done that, you can launch your study and share the link to your study or start recruiting via Optimal Panels.