Screener design and review

Great participant recruitment starts with the right screener. We create clear, concise, and unbiased screeners that accurately reflect your criteria to help target respondents precisely. If you already have your own screener, our thorough review process highlights potential issues and recommends solutions so that recruitment proceeds smoothly.
2000+ projects completed
Screeners created for 30+ countries
1000+ screeners created or reviewed
Two female market researchers work on market research screener
Why are screeners important?

Designing screeners that help you target respondents precisely

FieldworkHub’s experienced team can design or review your screener and advise on potential issues or improvements before recruitment begins, ensuring the content is optimised for your market research objectives. Careful screener preparation reduces risk, strengthens sample quality, and increases the likelihood of engaging the right participants from the start.

The key to recruiting suitable respondents is having a well-crafted screener that accurately identifies your target audience. If you need support creating one, our experts can develop a tailored screener from scratch and validate it with you. If you already have a draft, we will thoroughly review it, ensuring we fully understand your goals while identifying any gaps, ambiguities, or risks that could impact participant relevance or data quality.

Our process

Our screener writing process

1
Understand client brief
Before creating a screener, it is important to set out the overall goals of your research and clearly define your target audience. These considerations guide the framing of each question, and help ensure that only the intended participants are selected.
2
Develop questions
Well-crafted questions are essential to identify eligible respondents while minimising the risk of potential fraudulent or unqualified participants. Avoid leading questions and think about including ‘red herring’ responses to catch out professional respondents.
3
Create exclusion criteria
Exclusion criteria should be incorporated into the screener in a way that makes them difficult for respondents to guess. B2B exclusion criteria are likely to include job role and seniority, while consumer criteria often include past purchasing habits and intentions.
4
Test screener logic
Finally, every screener should undergo thorough internal testing to verify that all logic, skip patterns and exclusion criteria function correctly. The review stage should also check that the screener flows smoothly and avoids collecting lots of unnecessary data.
What sets us apart

Features of FieldworkHub screeners

Effective questions
We write clear and effective questions that are free from jargon and avoid leading participants toward particular qualifying answers.
Transparency and consent
Screeners must obtain informed consent from participants by explaining what the study entails, how the data will be used, and what will be expected of participants.
Efficient screening
A good screener captures all necessary information, while eliminating unsuitable candidates fast and ensuring good respondents don’t get frustrated or lose interest.
A women showing a man a screener on her laptop
Key benefits

Benefits of our approach to screeners

Captures all necessary information
Eliminates unsuitable respondents quickly
Avoid leading questions that allow candidates to guess what type of participants the research is seeking
Test candidates’ knowledge of the subject (especially important in B2B research)
Minimises risk that suitable contacts get frustrated by the length of screening and lose interest
Checks that candidates can express their understanding of the subject and their views clearly
Case studies

Case studies of projects where we developed screeners

We have created hundreds of screeners for consumer, B2B and healthcare projects. Here is a small selection of projects where we developed detailed screeners from a high-level set of client requirements.

Need help to develop or optimise your screener for a market research project?

Contact our feasibility specialists to discuss your specific research needs and how we can help you gain deeper insights by providing a framework or fine-tuning your market research screener.