Screener question

What a screener does

Every survey has a population in mind: residents of a borough, people who used a service in the last six months, carers, cyclists, staff on a particular contract. The screener establishes membership of that population before you spend the respondent's goodwill on questions that assume it.

It has two jobs. It protects the respondent from an irrelevant survey, and it protects your data from answers given by people who were guessing at a context they do not have.

Writing one that works

• Hide the target. "Do you cycle at least once a week?" as question one of a survey clearly about cycling tells the respondent which answer gets them in. Bury the qualifying option in a list: "Which of these have you done in the past week? Walked for 20 minutes or more / Cycled / Driven / Used a bus / None of these."
• Ask about behaviour, not identity. "Have you contacted the council in the past six months?" is checkable against memory. "Are you an engaged resident?" is not.
• Set a real time window. "Ever" qualifies nearly everybody and produces a sample recalling something from 2011.
• Keep it short. One or two questions. A screener that is itself a survey defeats the purpose.
• Put it first. Screening after the substantive questions means you have already collected data you are about to discard.

A worked example

A hospital trust wants feedback from people who attended outpatients in the last three months.

1. Q1: "Which of these have you visited at the hospital since [month]?" — checkboxes: A&E / Outpatients / An inpatient stay / A day-case procedure / None of these.
2. The outpatient section shows when Q1 includes "Outpatients".
3. A short closing block — "you told us you have not visited recently; is there anything else you would like to tell us?" — shows when Q1 is "None of these", so nobody hits a dead end.

That last step is the one people skip. A respondent who is screened out and then shown a blank page assumes the survey broke.

Common mistakes

• Leaking the answer. The survey title, the invitation email and the URL all give the game away before question one. If qualification matters, keep the framing broad in all three.
• Screening on something people cannot answer accurately. Household income bands, exact dates, and "how many times in the last year" are all guesses.
• Forgetting that the screener biases the sample. A screener does not remove sampling bias; it defines the population you are now biased within. Someone who does not recall a visit is screened out even though they visited.
• Analysing screener answers as findings. "82% of our respondents are cyclists" is a statement about your screener, not about the town.

In NumoForms

Screening is built with conditional logic: ask the qualifying question, then gate every subsequent section on the qualifying answer. Because the product uses visibility rules rather than jump targets — see branching — there is no separate "disqualify and redirect" action to configure. Nor is there per-cell quota management: the only cap is a survey-level response limit, enforced by a database trigger. What you get instead is straightforward: questions that do not apply are never rendered, and a screened-out respondent can still be shown a closing section you write, gated on the disqualifying answer like any other section.

If you are screening in order to route people to different blocks of questions rather than out of the survey entirely, the mechanics are the same, and the conditional logic feature page covers how any/all matching works.