Balance & Question Quotas: Two New Ways to Enhance Research Fidelity

dscout is excited to announce two new features intended to make finding participants more seamless and offer researchers more control: participant balancing and question quotas. 

With participant balancing and question quotas, researchers can better home in on and target the right mixes of potential research participants for their studies. These are available for our Express and Recruit products. Read on to learn more about each.

Balance

Skewed participant samples—in the form of over recruiting specific groups of people—limits data's power, and insight-generation ability. With our balance feature, the dscout platform automatically ensures an equitable mix of potential participants on the following demographic variables:

1. Gender-identity
2. Age
3. Ethnicity

Simply click the toggle in the audience tab during setup to safeguard against participant pools with more than 65% on any segment within any of these variables (e.g., 13-17 year-old or identify as male). Balance is easy, ensures representative demographics mix, and keeps you focused on the more nuanced recruitment criteria needed to answer your research questions.

If your recruit requires even more control, then question quotas will meet your need.

Question Quotas

In addition to a representative and balanced sample, your research may call for recruiting subsets of the population based on behavioral, perceptual, or attitudinal variables. For those use cases, dscout has introduced quotas for questions.

With question quotas, you can now set a maximum number of answers for any single-select question. If a participant's selection is above your set quota for that question, they'll be excused as a potential scout, saving you time. 

Use question quotas to:

• Ensure no more than 50% of your sample are "non-customers"
• Recruit a blend of brand or product personas (e.g., tryers, buyers, detractors)
• Protect against over recruitment on project-specific variables (e.g., company size)

Together, participant balance and question quotas offer a new level of control and precision when recruiting and conducting quick-turn qualitative research. Obtain representative participant groups and protect against over-sampling on critical variables. These features are not mutually exclusive: use both for maximum control over your recruitment. 

Both are available now: Learn more about participant balance here and question quotas here.