Screening questions are a powerful way to ensure that the participants who take part in your study genuinely represent your target audience.

Adding screening questions at the beginning of your study makes sure that you only receive responses from participants who meet certain criteria.

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.

You can add screening questions to your study via the Questionnaire tab of your study.

On the Questionnaire tab of the study setup page press the “+ Add screening question” button. Type your question into the Question box then select the way you’d like your candidates to respond from the Options section.

There are three options available:

Checkbox:

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.

Radio button:

This is a button that a participant can click to ‘check’ or select, like a checkbox. Unlike the checkbox, the participant can only click one option.

Drop-down: This will produce a drop-down menu that your participants can select one answer from.

Once you’ve selected your question type, you’ll add in your options (the participant’s choice of responses) by clicking the “+Add option” button.

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. If you want to, this can be edited to display the message of your choice by simply pressing the “Edit” button.

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 to start getting those responses rolling in! Your participants will see the screening question on the welcome page of your study, pictured below.

Participants who do not meet your screening criteria will be rejected from your study and will not impact your results. Their responses will be excluded from the analysis by default.

You can identify these participants from the Participants section of the Results tab and selecting Excluded from results from the dropdown.

To see if your screening questions are doing their job, simply head on over to the Results section of your study and select the Overview tab. In the Summary, look for the message “xx (xx%) of applicants have been screened out of participating in the study.” This will tell you how many candidates have been rejected from your study.

Participants that have been rejected will not show up in the results of your study, they can be found in the ‘excluded participants’ list as they did not actually enter the study in the first place. This way, you can rest assured your results will be targeted and high quality.As a best practice, we recommend you use screening questions whether you use Optimal Recruitment services or recruit on your own.

For the best completion rates, we recommend keeping your screener survey questions to under 15 questions, ideally between 5-10 questions.

Read more about setting up screening questions and how to recruit high quality participants.