Online Panel Factsheet: Quality at Every Stage

Multi-source and Multi-method Recruitment: Our proprietary online panel of North American adults called mythoughtsmatter offers our clients an excellent Internet-based research resource. Our panelists are recruited from a variety of online and offline sources and methods, including random recruitment by telephone and mail. This allows us to control for recruitment biases that occur with single-method or similar recruitment strategies.

Sign-up:  We exercise due diligence when it comes to signing up panel members.  For the panelists we find on the web and elsewhere, we engage them in a double opt-in procedure via our web interface.  After submitting an initial form to us with basic demographic and other data to us, we send an authorization e-mail to the address given. This authorization e-mail must be returned to us before the registration process is complete.  This procedure is in keeping with standard best practices in the industry in Canada and the US. 

Screening and Cleaning: Respondents are screened against criteria (e.g. based on age, household member involved in marketing research, etc.) that make them ineligible for participation in online panel research and removed from the panel.  Prophis also actively examines respondent data for indications that the respondent did not give meaningful responses (e.g. where a respondent does not contribute logically meaningful data).  When we find this to occur, the respondent is removed from the panel.

Maintenance: Respondents may keep their membership active as long as they keep us updated with their current e-mail and other information.  While participation in a given survey is always voluntary, we require that respondents participate at least occasionally and always responsibly when completing surveys that we send tothem.  In order to keep the panel “fresh” for our clients, a panelist will complete no more than two of our surveys in a month.  And should a panelist ever wish to be removed from our panel for any reason, we honor that request within an expeditious amount of time.

Validation:  We have examined our panel is a number of ways, particularly by comparing sub-samples that have been recruited via different methods and sources, in order to assure ourselves (and our clients!) that we have a well-balanced sample to call upon.  When we conduct surveys with our panel on behalf of clients, we ensure that the demographic composition of the survey sample of completes is comparable to the known universe of online adults. This gives even further assurance that our client receives a well-balanced sample that is representative of the greater universe to which conclusions are to be drawn.

Panel Advantages: Our panelists currently number in the tens of thousands and our panel resources continue to grow to serve the needs of our clients. The quality of our sample for research purposes, our understanding of sample, and our high standards in panel maintenance, set us apart from our competitors.