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Reporting a Participant
Reporting a Participant

A respondent was untruthful, was not who they said they were, did not provide any value

Justin L avatar
Written by Justin L
Updated over a week ago

Our goal is to provide you with the highest quality participants for your projects. While we do our best to verify the identity of our users, sometimes people will lie or misrepresent themselves on the platform or on your screener survey. If you find yourself in a situation in which a Respondent has misrepresented themselves, or lied on their screener resulting, there are some steps you can take.

Immediately stop the interview and let them know that since their answers didn't match what you were looking for, you will not be able to continue. You can either pay them in full, partial, or with no incentive.

Pay a Partial Incentive

If the research participant provided some value to your team, you have an option to provide a partial incentive.

  1. Please notify a member of Respondent via the chat portal. Please include the project name and participant's name in the description to our support team on chat.

  2. Please message the participant, notifying them of your decision to pay a partial incentive, and explain the situation as clearly as you can. The more detail the better.

  3. Once this is complete, please let us know the reduced incentive amount and we will apply this to the participant's response on the back end.

Pay no incentive

If you find the Participant provided no value whatsoever to your team, these are the steps you should follow:

  1. Message the participant, notifying them of your decision to mark them as No Show. Explain as clearly as you can your reason for the No Show.
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  2. Participants marked as No Show will not receive any compensation and you will not be charged for the interview.
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  3. Report the participant. Click on the vertical ellipses drop-down next to the participant's profile image to remove them from the project. You will not be charged.
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  4. Navigate to the messages center and close the conversation with the Participant by hitting the cog in the top right-hand corner. This prevents future communication with them.

If you're being contacted off-platform

Please let the Respondent team know if a participant is communicating with you outside the platform regarding a dispute related to flagging/payment. Do not respond to Participants you have reported, which can encourage more unwanted contact.

Contacting researchers outside of the platform is against our Code of Conduct and can result in the participant's account suspension or removal. That said, we strongly encourage researchers to keep all communication on-platform.

If you give your personal contact information to participants, there is not much our team can do to stop unwanted contact. Our team can efficiently and effectively manage communications kept on-platform.

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