Internet Data Collection Quality Control

• No river sampling.
• Unique panelist verification- it is imperative that a respondent only answer the survey once.
• We use IP address matching and verification.
• We further verify unique panelists in every study by searching for and identifying duplicate IP addresses. If duplicates are found, the respondent may be removed from the response data and replaced with another respondent. IP checks allow us to identify individuals with different email addresses using the same computer to respond to the survey.
• Software and procedures to identify and remove respondents who speed through the survey ("speeders") and those who give the same response over and over ("trend responders"). Speeders and trend respondents give questionable and often inaccurate responses, and are thus removed from the response data.
• We provide cross-partner deduplication services when multiple panels are used. Panelists cannot change certain personal information they provide during the registration process. Notification emails are sent to panelists when their personal information has been changed.
• The use of CAPTCHA technology is employed to prevent bots and scripts from creating or editing panel accounts.
• Aggressively enforced "Three strikes, you're out" rule within our databases. Three infractions result in immediate removal from the panel.
• Permanent blocks of suspicious email addresses, domains and IPs.
• Upon completion of a study, the data is scrubbed for duplicate members and bad responses, and the infractions are recorded on the respondent's records.
• Clients can include verification questions in their survey, and our tools will scan for consistency of panelist response.
• Evaluation of panelist responses for consistency of data, length of time taken to complete the survey compared to the study average, the number of words written in open-ended questions, etc.