Positly’s Screening Guidelines

To use Positly’s screening features, we ask that you adhere to the following guidelines. These help us ensure that our platform works well for both researchers and participants.

1. Screening questions must be brief and topical. Your questions should be short and directly relevant to your screening criteria. Please determine participant eligibility before collecting other data.
2. Screening questions should be the first content participants see. Participants have a very short time to answer screening questions, so whenever possible, we ask that you provide long study disclosures and complex explanations only after determining participant eligibility.
3. Eligibility must be automatically determined by your activity. Screening questions are usually multiple-choice, but open-ended questions can work as long as your activity can immediately and automatically decide which participants are eligible. You won’t be able to manually review participant answers and determine eligibility.

Tips and best practices for screening

In addition to these requirements, we have some suggestions below to help improve your experience with screening participants.

1. Avoid “trick” screening questions. These include brain teasers, fine print questions, and other questions that intentionally lead participants into providing incorrect answers.

   It may seem like these questions identify inattentive participants, but in practice, they often select for other irrelevant or biasing traits (like excluding people who cannot read small print). It’s normal for participants (and everyone!) to expect patterns to continue.

2. Obscure your screening criteria in questions. This is important for screening questions because participants generally want to complete studies and get paid. Therefore, they are likely to choose answers that allow them to screen in. Avoid asking simple questions that clearly indicate your screening criteria.

   For example, if you are surveying fast food customers, a yes or no question like “Do you eat fast food?” likely reveals your criteria. It’s better to ask a question like “Which of these restaurants do you regularly visit?” with several options, including restaurants that don’t serve fast food.

3. Offer participants a wide range of “wrong” answer options. Despite Positly’s rigorous quality checks, some participants may choose answers at random. Having a wide range of ineligible or irrelevant options makes it more difficult for those participants to inadvertently screen into your activity.

   This is particularly important if relatively few participants should be eligible for your activity. For example, if you’re screening for participants who have an uncommon medical condition, offer them a wide range of more common medical conditions to choose from in addition to your target condition.

4. Ensure answer options are clear, mutually exclusive, and collectively exhaustive. Answer options should be easy to understand, and in multiple-choice questions, every answer option should be completely different from the others while also accounting for all possible options. (This is good advice for all survey questions, but it’s particularly important in
   screening questions.)

   For example, if you asked participants how often they ate breakfast, options consisting of “daily”, “weekly”, and “monthly” would be insufficient (not collectively exhaustive). Similarly, descriptors like “often”, “somewhat”, and “rarely” can have overlapping meanings (not mutually exclusive).

   It’s a good idea to include options like “something else” or “none of the above” so participants can answer accurately.

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