5 Ways to Make Your Next Screener a Great One
Screeners play an undeniably important role in ensuring that researchers get in touch with the participants that they need. This means that, without a well-crafted screener, it may be difficult for researchers to find the right fit and to conduct meaningful studies. Today, we’ll talk through five things that help to make a screener great so that you can implement them the next time you find yourself conducting research.
1 - The questions are placed in a funneled format
Organization is essential in many areas of life, and screeners are no exception. The screener should be laid out such that the questions form a funnel; it should begin with the most broad question and eventually lead into the more narrow ones. This mirrors natural thinking patterns and makes the screener easier to follow for the participant, allowing the process as a whole to run more smoothly. That said, when narrowing down the questions, it's important to recognize that this is not an opportunity to extract free information. You should ask narrow enough questions to know if the participant is a good candidate, but you should be careful to not scare them off by asking them too deep of questions without paying for their knowledge. The narrow questions should also be reasonable; screeners with qualifications that are difficult to meet can cause upwards of 90% of otherwise qualified participants to fail.
2 - It looks good
It might seem simple, but one of the most important components of creating a great screener is making sure that it looks good. Simply put, there are some formats that don’t look good, and they generally cause participants to leave a screener behind. Take, for example, bulky ranking grids which have the highest dropout rate of any question type. Your screener should be clean as well as organized in the funneled structure mentioned previously. This allows it to be easily understood at a glance by your clients, recruiting partners, and participants alike.
3 - It keeps things simple
Simplicity is key in the case of screeners. All of the questions that are included on the document should be easily comprehensible, not easily misconstrued. By ensuring that the wording is clear and that people won’t mistake one meaning for another, you can significantly reduce the amount of second guessing that will need to be done by participants. Not only will this help the screener to be completed efficiently, but it will also help you to gain the proper insights.
4 - It’s filled with purpose, not fluff
When creating a screener, it can be easy to accidentally include questions that don’t offer you much in return. These inclusions often cause screeners to have more than 15 questions, an amount at which we commonly see a significant drop off rate. Avoid wasting space obtaining useless information by using your screener wisely and making sure that you fill it with questions with substance and a clear purpose. The objective of the screener is to find the participants that are the best fit for your research project, don’t miss out on that opportunity by including the wrong kinds of questions.
5 - It includes various kinds of questions
In the world of research, screeners are not the most engaging component of the process. You can work to make them more appealing as well as add depth to the answers that you receive by using various kinds of questions. For example, you can include multiple choice questions, yes and no questions, scale questions, and so on. With this in mind, it’s also important to strike a balance when selecting your question types. Having too many open ended questions or not enough can easily make or break a screener.
Written by: Sadie Estey
