Panel quality is at the core of our Youth Panel business. We believe rigorous processes need to be followed at every stage of online fieldwork, from panel recruitment and management through to sampling practices and data processing.
Our impressive Youth Panel requires no partners to complete projects, and our clients benefit from confidence in our consistency of data. If different target groups within a project have different behaviours, we know it is a real-world difference and not down to varied sample sources.
We have a range of highly effective policies and procedures in place to ensure our clients generate dependable data:
- We monitor patterns in incentive redemption to pinpoint and deal with fraudulent respondents.
- Our de-duplication processes prevent respondents from completing a survey more than once.
- We flag individuals who speed through surveys, provide ‘patterned’ responses or fail ‘red-herring’ trap questions.
- We apply a ‘3 strikes’ policy and permanently remove panellists from the sample pool if they repeatedly fail quality checks.
- Geo-IP traps: If the location associated with the respondent’s IP address doesn’t match the targeted location of the survey, the respondent is prevented from completing the survey.
Our quality procedures give clients complete confidence in the sample source, allowing them to focus on delivering strategic insights.
In an industry plagued by plummeting incentives and response rates to match, we believe it is critical to respect and retain the panellists upon whom our industry depends.
The panellist’s attention cannot be expected without reasonable incentives; therefore we aim to develop a strong relationship with our panellists and pay fair incentives. In return, we see consistently healthy response rates and our clients benefit from considered responses and dependable data.
Maintaining interest through a varied approach
Student Edge members join our online community to participate in a range of activities, ranging from online surveys to focus groups, as well as in-home product tests and promotions. Through this approach we are able to maintain a high level of panellist engagement, while ensuring that panellists who have taken part in promotions are excluded from relevant categories of research for three months (default) or longer (as per client preference).
High panellist retention
A research panel is considered ‘healthy’ if it has a high panellist retention rate. If a provider burns out panellists with poor incentives and is forced to replace these panellists via cheap recruitment sources, this will show up in the poor data. Our high retention rate allows us to maintain a constant sample composition over multiple wave trackers.