Online survey research has a lot of moving parts, but getting the right respondents is essential to conducting effective research.
Screening questions help ensure that only the most relevant respondents complete your survey. By excluding unqualified respondents, you can save time, reduce costs, and gather data that accurately represent your target audience.
What are Screening Questions?
Screeners are essentially specialised questions designed to ensure that the participants you include in your research are exactly who you want. The initial questions of an online survey typically serve as screening questions to determine whether you want the respondent to continue with the main questionnaire as part of your sample.
To create a screener, consider your research goal and the characteristics of the individuals you want to learn from. Then, draft questions based on those criteria. Decide what attributes or characteristics you’d absolutely want respondents to have, what, if anything, would make you exclude someone, and other elements that will help you assess if a person is a suitable candidate.
For instance, maybe you're looking to explore opportunities for a movie theatre recommendation app, and you want to reach avid theatre goers. You might decide you need to target people who have visited at least one movie theatre in the last month and exclude them if they haven't visited any theatres in the last month. You might also decide that it would be helpful to get feedback from people who have watched movies from different genres, so add an additional screening question asking about the genre of all the movies they've seen in the last year. This can help with setting quotas or conducting analysis later, reducing the need for data weighting or additional follow-ups.
Now that you understand what screening questions are, let's review common reasons for why they are used.
Why are Screening Questions Important
Below are 3 reasons for leveraging screening questions:
- Screeners save valuable time for you and the respondent. With the use of screening questions, you can prevent respondents from spending time on a survey that isn’t relevant to them. Meanwhile, researchers can focus on the specific characteristics and criteria that matter most.
- You can reduce your survey costs. Most survey providers charge by the number of individuals who take your survey. Screening questions help you avoid paying for responses from people who don’t meet your criteria.
- You can improve your data quality. Responses from irrelevant survey participants can dilute your data, making it less reliable. By only including well designed screening question in your survey, you can set a higher standard for the data you receive and reduce the likelihood of capturing dishonest responses.
Common Types of Screening Questions
Typically, screening questions will follow a funnel:
- Which of these do you own/do...?
- How often do you...?
- Which brand do you own/buy...?
At each stage, respondents who do not meet the criteria are politely screened out and told that they are not the person you are looking for — making it clear that it is not their fault in the questionnaire.
Below are some examples of common types of screening questions that can help you target the right audience for your survey.
Demographic
Sometimes screening criteria can be based on basic demographic information like age, gender, location, and household composition. Demographic screeners help researchers profile the ideal respondent and ensure the survey targets the correct audience.
Firmographics or industry-specific
These questions are based on company-related characteristics. They help ensure that only professionals from relevant industries, company sizes, or job roles can participate in your survey.
Products and services
However, more likely, you'll want to include or exclude people based on their usage or experience with a product. For example, if your survey is about a travel website, then product or service screening questions might ask where the respondent has used similar travel sites in the past or how often they travel for leisure.
Attitudes
You can also have screening questions based a respondents’ knowledge or opinions about a topic area. This can include factors such as outlook, perception, or affinity towards something. For example, you might want to interview people who are either supporters of your brand or those who are critical of it, and therefore screen for attitudes toward a specific topic.
Behavioural
Behavioural screening questions are designed to examine past behaviours or roles, such as how frequently a respondent uses a particular tool or performs a certain action. For instance, you may wish to interview individuals who regularly shop online for groceries. To be more precise, "regular" could be defined as those who purchase groceries online once a week. Thus, you are screening for a specific behaviour and setting a clear criterion for this behaviour.
Why are behavioural questions so important? If respondents lack firsthand experience, their answers may be based on perception rather than actual usage, leading to unreliable data. For example, someone may be a customer of a bank but never use its mobile app. If they are included in a survey about app experience, their responses would skew results. Clearly defining behavioural criteria helps improve data quality.
Tips for Writing Effective Screening Questions
Ready to start writing screening questions? Let's review best practices and tips for your next online survey.
Here are some examples:
Ask screening questions upfront: It is important to be considerate of respondents' time. An online panel member who gets screened out after five minutes without receiving payment may feel justifiably annoyed. Avoid having survey participants answer too many questions before screening them out.
Disguise your screeners: It is important that your selection criteria are disguised, so that the respondent does not know (or cannot easily guess) what to answer to qualify. Experienced online panel members will often try to work out what they should answer to earn incentives. Avoid making it too apparent what you’re looking for in your screeners.
If you are looking, for example, for people who visited McDonald’s at least once a week, don’t ask:
Do you visit McDonald’s at least once a week?
- Yes
- No
Instead, ask:
Which of these fast-food restaurants do you ever visit?
- Burger King
- Chick-fil-A
- Jack in the Box
- KFC
- McDonald’s
- Sonic
- Taco Bell
- None of these
If the respondent visits McDonald’s, ask:
How often do you visit a McDonald’s?
- Every day
- Several times a week
- At least once a week
- At least once a month
- At least once every three months
- Less often
Use simple and straightforward language: Early questions should be straightforward for the respondent to answer and allow them to ease into the subject. If they cause the respondent to work hard to provide the answer, this will increase the likelihood of an early termination of the interview, so efforts should be made to avoid using overly complicated jargon and make questions as simple as possible.
Keep it short: As a general rule of thumb, try not to ask more than five screening questions. Asking too many difficult screeners can frustrate or fatigue the respondent. How long should a survey be? It’s best to keep surveys under 12 minutes to reduce dropout rate.
Keep it specific: It helps to provide precise answers that aren't open to interpretation. For instance, if you want to know how often someone does something, use specific time periods like days or weeks rather than vague phrases like “often” or “usually.” Aim for most of the questions to be close ended but allow for “other” or “not applicable” responses so that you don't get false positive responses.
Identify the details that matter: It’s easy to assume a simple screening question is enough to qualify the right participants. However, to gather truly valuable data, you need to dig deeper and be clear about exactly who you want to reach.
Let’s say you’re conducting research on Netflix subscribers. A basic screening question might be:
Do you currently have a paid Netflix subscription?
- Yes
- No (terminate)
At first glance, this seems like a solid question. However, there’s an important detail to consider—many Netflix users aren’t the ones actually paying for the subscription. A teenager watching Netflix on their parents’ account is very different from the person who makes the decision to subscribe.
If your research is focused on consumer buying behaviour, you’ll need to refine your screening to ensure you’re reaching the actual decision-makers. In this case, you should add a follow-up question:
Are you the primary account holder who pays for the subscription?
- Yes (qualified)
- No (terminate)
This small but important distinction ensures your survey is capturing the right audience.
Before finalising your screening questions, always ask yourself: Am I truly capturing the audience I need, or do I need to refine my approach? The details make all the difference.
When drafting screening question, take what might be just a description of the audience (in this example, streamers) and unpack that into qualifying questions that will help you find those people in your survey.
Let’s recap: Screening is the process of defining the key characteristics of qualifying questions in your survey. The most common pillars of audience definition come down to factors like demographics, firmographics, products and services, attitudes and behaviours.
Clear screening criteria and a well-crafted survey are some of the most important pieces in ensuring that you are including the right participants in your research. Don't shortcut these efforts.
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Watch our 14-minute Online Survey Training Module: How to Create a Questionnaire to learn more. There you’ll learn more about steps for questionnaire success and additional considerations for creating a survey. Or, get in touch with our experts, and we’ll provide you with further advice based on your specific objectives and needs.
