All Collections
Working with questions
Setting up qualifying questions
Setting up qualifying questions

Learn how to screen in respondents by using qualifying questions.

Parm Bansil avatar
Written by Parm Bansil
Updated over a week ago

You can set up qualifying questions in your survey to make sure that only respondents who select your chosen qualifying answer(s) will be shown the rest of your survey.

How to set up a qualifying question

Setting up a qualifying question is simple. First you'll need to add a question, choose your question type and fill in the question and answers.

Then, click on Qualify respondents, in the bottom right hand side of the card. This will open up the Qualifying panel.

On the right hand side of all answer options there will be a Allow Qualifying toggle. Select to apply qualifying for each answer option you wish to use to qualify respondents into your survey. If you wish to remove qualifying answers, click the same toggle to deactivate qualifying.

Only respondents who qualify in will proceed and contribute to the sample size you have selected, so you'll only pay for answers from respondents who screen-in and complete the survey.

Respondents who qualify out end the survey straight away by not selecting one of your qualifying answers, for this reason, qualifying questions can only be placed at the beginning of your survey (though they can come after an opening text card, if you choose to use one). 

Adding answer quotas

You can also add answer quotas to qualifying questions on surveys. This allows you to specify the percentage of respondents that provided this answer.

How many qualifying questions can I add?

We recommend using no more than 3 qualifying questions per survey to make sure enough people can screen-in, and to give you a big enough sample size to be useful. But, if you want, you can add up to 5 qualifying questions to target respondents who really matter to you.

Qualifying questions vs. demographic targeting

You only need to use a qualifying question when the demographic you want is not available in-built in the Audience page. Asking qualifying questions alongside using demographic filters is not necessary: firstly because you'd be spending credits on questions we already ask after you select the demographic filter in the Audience page, and because there can be some minor mismatches between what's in the respondent's profile and what's answered. This may happen for two reasons:

  1. Demographic data is updated every 30 days, leaving room for changes to have occurred between the latest update and your survey launch

  2. The usual error margin expected in surveys is 5-10% depending on the sample size, which will apply to the questions themselves regardless of whether they are of a demographic nature or not

Please get in touch if you have any more questions about using qualifying questions.

Did this answer your question?