Screening Out: How to remove unsuitable participants from your OpinionX survey

If you need to remove unsuitable participants from your survey (people who don't fit your target criteria), you can screen them out. Screening someone out ends their survey early, shows them a screen-out page informing them their session has ended, and records them in your results with the Screened Out participant status so they're kept separate from the people who actually completed your survey.

When a participant is screened out:

Screening out is the right tool whenever a participant fails a qualifying question, like having wrong job role title, being from a region that falls outside the scope of your survey, being under 18, a "no" answer to a question like "have you purchased from us recently?", and so on.

Screened Out vs Over Quota: Screening out means the participant didn't qualify. If a participant qualifies but the group you wanted them for is already full, that's a different outcome handled by Quota Management, which gives them the separate Over Quota status. This article just covers screen-outs.

Branching logic now includes a Screen Out option in the 'Go to' destination dropdown. Create a branch with a condition for who should be removed (for example, age is under 18) and set its destination to Screen Out. Anyone routed there ends the survey with the Screened Out status, and sees the default screen-out page.

This is the fastest way to remove people as early as possible using a qualifying question near the start of your survey. Check out our full guide to Branching Logic for more information on setting up these conditions in your survey.

Finish Pages now have a Participant Status dropdown setting. This dropdown lets you tag every participant who reaches that Finish Page as one of two options: Completed or Screened Out. Participants will never see which status they have been assigned, nor the name of this Finish Page.

The main reason to use a customised Finish Page instead of the default Screened Out destination is to set a redirect link or personalised message for screened out participants, for example when recruiting participants from external panels.

Why only Finish Pages, not mid-survey steps?

A participant is only given the Screened Out status if they're routed to a screen-out destination or page. Anyone who simply stops somewhere in the middle without reaching a finish page becomes an Incomplete, not a screen-out.

If you don't create a custom Finish Page for screened-out participants, the destination they are sent to will be OpinionX's built-in Screen-Out page:

This works the moment you set up a screen-out route and there's nothing you need to configure. It auto-translates to match your survey's language, it uses a different icon in the survey builder so it's easy to tell apart from your standard Finish Page, and it adapts to your custom survey theme.

To change what screened-out participants see:

You can create as many screen-out Finish Pages as you like — for example, one with a message specifically for people in the wrong region for your study, and another Finish Page for people in the wrong role for your research — and then branch participants to whichever one fits their answers.

The Results Overview page shows a Screened Out tile (with its own icon and colour) once your survey contains a screen-out route. Clicking this tile will hide all other participants so that your results dashboard only includes screened-out responses:

Additionally, you'll find with a status emoji beside each participant in the View All Participants dropdown on this summary section at the top of the Results Overview tab:

The Participants Tab also labels each screened-out participant with the Screened Out icon.

Segmentation → Participant Status lets you include or exclude screen-outs from your analysis. By default they're included; filter them out whenever you want to look only at qualifying participants.

See Participant Statuses for more info on how screen-outs factor into your completion rate and participant counts.

Most external recruitment platforms for buying survey participants requires screened-out respondents to be passed back from OpinionX along with their ID code or other personalised data. To do this, you need to activate dynamic URL parameters on the redirect link of the Finish Page you send screened-out participants to.

We have a detailed overview of the setup required for 3rd-party panels, but below you'll find a quick summary of the specific step related to redirect link parameters for screen-out finish pages.

Step 1

Go to the Finish Page you created just for screened-out respondents. This should be a Finish Page with a clear name and the status set to "Screened-Out".

Step 2

Click the block settings icon in the bottom-right corner (⚙️) and enable the checkbox titled "Redirect link parameters"

Step 3

Allow the parameters to be automatically added. Don't manually type them into the redirect field. Parameters will only appear if you have (i) already set up a field on the enrichment tab to store them, and (ii) you're using a Hidden Fields link to pass the parameter into OpinionX within the participation url for survey respondents.

Here's an example showing how the field should work when everything is set up correctly, with OpinionX automatically appending the custom parameters at the end of the template version of the redirect link: