Participant Status: Completes, Incompletes, Screened Out, Over Quota

Every participant in your survey now has a status that tells you how their survey session ended. This makes it easy to separate people who finished your survey from people who didn't qualify, people who arrived after a group was full, and people who quit part-way through.

This guide explains the four statuses, how each one is assigned, how they appear in your results, and how they affect your completion rate and participant counts.

These statuses are mutually exclusive, so each participant has exactly one status at a time. It is not possible for them to be both "incomplete" and "screened out" at the same time.

1. Completes: Assigned when a participant reaches the end of your survey, a Finish Page with its Participant Status set to the default Completed value.

2. Incomplete: Assigned when a participant starts your survey but doesn't reach a finish page. An in-progress session converts to an Incomplete 24 hours after they started. See our dedicated guide to Incompletes for more detail on how this partial data is captured and stored. A participant who never reaches any finish page ends up as an Incomplete, regardless of your branching setup.

3. Screened Out: Assigned when a participant is routed to a screen-out destination through Branching Logic. Screened-Out participants can be tagged with this status by reaching OpinionX's default screen-out destination or by reaching a Finish Page with the Participant Status dropdown set to Screened Out.

4. Over Quota: Assigned when a participant matches a quota that is already full. This status is only ever set by the quotas system, never through branching logic or the status dropdown on a Finish Page's configuration.

Results Overview tiles

The top of your Results Overview shows a tile for each status that your survey can produce, each with its own icon and colour. A survey with no screen-out routes and no quotas shows only Completes and Incomplete; add a screen-out route and the Screened Out tile appears, add a quota and the Over Quota tile appears.

Each tile is also a toggle for activating a segmentation filter toggle, click it to include or exclude that status from your results view. By default every status is included when you open the Results Overview page.

Additionally, if you open the "View All Participants" dropdown on the survey summary section at the top of the Results Overview tab, you'll see an emoji beside each participant indicating which group they belong to:

Participants Tab

Each participant row shows an icon and label for their status, so you can scan who ended up where, along with a column that specifically shows whether a participant counted towards a quota or was rejected because a quota was full.

Segmentation: Participant Status is available as a segmentation option, so you can activate customised filters, build saved segments, and incorporate this completion-type data into your analysis work on OpinionX.

There are several ways to reach a valid end of a survey, other than just finishing it successfully. Completion Rate measures the share of participants who reached any valid end state (Completes, Screened Out, or Over Quota) out of all participants.

Put simply, it's everyone except incompletes: Completion Rate = (All participants − Incompletes) ÷ All participants. This gives an accurate read on how many people who started your survey actually reached a proper end, rather than dropping off midway.

The completion rate and median duration metrics are affected by segmentation filters, so toggling on/off specific status types on the results dashboard will change these → for example, if you click the "Completed" tile, it will filter out Incompletes, Screened Outs, and Over Quotas, so your completion rate will become 100%.

Your pricing plan's participant limit (25 on the free tier, unlimited on paid) counts every stored participant, regardless of status. Completes, Incomplete, Screened Out and Over Quota participants all count towards the limit of 25 participants. Once you reach 25 participants, additional participants will still be collected by OpinionX for all status types (ie. screening and quotas will continue to work), but participant 26+ will not be visible to you on the results dashboard.

Deleting participants removes them from OpinionX entirely, so they no longer count towards your limit of 25 participants. For example, deleting Incompletes will unlock extra spaces on the free tier, letting you see more respondents from other status types like Completes.

By default, your results include every participant type — Completes, Incomplete, Screened Out and Over Quota are all counted in your Results Overview and charts to begin with. You can then narrow your view in two ways:

Including all statuses by default keeps your participant counts consistent with your plan's participant limit, so you never see a survey that's "over its limit" while the results page appears to show fewer participants. You can see this in action on the Results Overview, where the four status tiles always add up to your total participant count.

Does a screened-out or over-quota participant count as a "complete"? No. Only Completes count as completed responses. Screened Out and Over Quota are separate end states and are excluded from your completed-response counts and from your completion rate.

Can a participant have more than one status? No. Each participant has exactly one status, determined by how their session ended. It is not possible for someone to be both Completed and Screened Out, Incomplete and Over Quota, or Screened Out and Over Quota. It is only ever possible for a participant to have one destination status.

Can I change a participant's status manually? Not currently. A participant's status is set automatically by how their session ended.

Do these statuses export? Yes. Each participant's status is included in your data exports.