Whoever was recruited was interviewed

Screening questionnaire in qualitative research is that kind of stuff that project managers often find boring to do themselves. They either attempt to delegate it to an intern or junior manager, or take a screening from a previous project, tweak it slightly, send to a Client, who is busy with more serious tasks, has a quick look and writes "ok, go ahead"...

It seems that we begun to forget that screener is a crucial document in qual, because every improperly asked question or incorrectly worded alternative leads to the wrong target audience interviewed

I once heard my Client telling her colleague: “Oksana even screeners prepares for us herself…” It made me smile. Yes, I prepare screeners for all of my projects myself, since I understand how important it is that they work for all parts involved - the clients, recruiters, and respondents

Let me remind us all what is really important to remember when developing (for agencies) and verifying (for clients) a screening questionnaire for qualitative research:

1) The screening is prepared based on the target audience profile defined by a Client in a Brief and finalized with an Agency in its Research Proposal (see my previous article about Qual Briefs) 

If you introduce new recruiting criteria during the screening development stage, the agency may suspend the project for cost recalculation and may even have to postpone the fieldwork. Therefore, try to be as precise as possible with defining the target audience for the research at the brief and proposal stage.

2) Preparing a screening for international projects with one supervising agency and several partners in other countries, is an even more responsible task, because here we need also to take into account:

» Local specifics that the project manager may not even be aware of. Therefore, discuss your screener with local partners before sending it to the Client

» The workload of local agencies. Good agencies / personalities (and you know that a personality of a researcher is the key in qual) are frequently booked well in advance, and moving the fieldwork because the criteria have been tightened may be impossible

3) The more adequate recruitment criteria, the more realistic target audience you can expect for your research

If you complicate the criteria for the sake of complication, if you want to find the target audience, artificially created in a PPT presentation while sitting in the office, or if you want to invite people who do not exist in real life, you can easily find an agency to do it for you! Ask me how, and I'll tell you a lot of interesting recruiting tips... Yes, I know how to do it. No, we don't do it that way 

4) The shorter the screening, the more likely it is that recruiters will ask potential research participants all of the questions and, most crucially, that they will respond

In most cases, the more complicated the recruitment criteria and, consequently, the screening - the less comprehension by the Client of who their target customers really are

5) A recruiter is not a moderator. The recruiter's role is to read the questions exactly as they appear in the screening questionnaire, with no improvisation. The project manager is responsible for formulating questions

6) A screener should be formulated in a way that is understandable to recruiters and comfortable for respondents. The project manager's task is to design screening so that the conversation flows as logically and naturally as possible. Let us not forget about ethics either...

So that's probably enough, because this is not a training in writing screeners, but rather a reminder that neither agencies nor clients should overlook this part of qualitative research

We should always remember that even the best moderator and analyst is not able to fix problems with determining the target audience and recruiting respondents. Whoever was recruited was interviewed

Let's make qual great again :)

Pleskova, your old-school qual researcher