Why do I have unrelated questions in my pre-defined panel?
There are two reasons why seemingly unrelated questions (prescription to medical marijuana, windsurfing, income, etc.) may appear in your pre-defined panel:
Preventing positivity bias Conjointly includes certain questions to prevent respondents from ‘trying to qualify for any survey’ through positive bias (a.k.a. acquiescence bias) (tendency to say “yes” to questions). If the main qualifying question is a yes/no question (e.g., “Are you studying to be a nurse?”), there may be respondents who say “yes” simply to qualify for that study. We will sometimes add other yes/no qualifying questions (e.g., “Are you a wind surfer?”, “Do you have a prescription to medical marijuana?”) and screen out those who say yes to too many of them (where it is unlikely that they are a wind-surfing nursing student who uses medical marijuana).
Standard profiling questions We include some questions as standard profiling questions that you can use as segmentation variables. These are especially relevant for product and pricing surveys. A common profiling question is asking respondents to identify which income band they fall into.