| Applies to | Screeners (recruiting from Partner Panels) |
Using a screener to recruit from Partner Panels helps you find participants who meet more specific, often niche criteria. However, there are sometimes limitations imposed by Dscout’s third-party partners. For example, using knockout logic on multi-select questions works a little differently from how you might be used to with a standard Dscout screener.
Limitation
Standard knockout logic on multi-select questions allows you to apply one of three options to each answer choice on a given question:
- May select: A participant may or may not select this answer with no bearing on their qualification.
- Must select: If a participant does not select this answer, they are disqualified, regardless of their other selections.
- Knockout: If a participant selects this answer, they are disqualified, regardless of their other selections.
In a standard Dscout screener, you can include multiple Must select answers and only require participants to select one of these answers in order to qualify. However, Partner Panels screeners require participants to select all answers marked Must select in order to qualify—even if you only need them to select one.
Solution
If you want to program a multi-select question to have more than one acceptable response in a Partner Panels screener, you can do so using a combination of knockout logic and skip logic.
Let’s say you’re looking for participants who have used either a drip coffee maker or French press in the past year and only want to disqualify those who’ve used neither. Here’s what your first question would look like:
Which of the following ways have you made coffee in the past year? Please select all that apply.
- Drip coffee maker (May select)
- French press (May select)
- Espresso machine (May select)
- Pour over (May select)
- Other (May select)
You’d then follow this with a question in which all answers are marked as Knockout responses. The content of the question doesn’t matter because its only purpose is to disqualify the participants who see it (more on this later). Here’s an example:
Which of the following best describes where you live?
- Urban (Knockout)
- Suburban (Knockout)
- Rural (Knockout)
The important thing here is that only the participants you want to disqualify should see this question. So, you’d then apply skip logic to your acceptable answers so anyone who selects those skips the disqualifying follow-up. In this case, that would be Drip coffee maker and French press. By applying skip logic to these answers and not the others, you ensure anyone who only selects Espresso machine, Pour over, or Other is sent to your disqualifying question and knocked out of the screener.
Here’s how this series of questions would look while building your screener: