We all, at some point of survey creation, faced the same struggle: how to find the required amount of participants.
The most obvious way is to share our questionnaire on social media, asking our friends and close-proximity relatives for help.
But such an approach poses certain limitations: for one, your friends may not meet your target group criteria. Or they are too similar to each other, posing risk for non-response bias (to find out more about non-response bias, check our article about it in here).
So here goes another strategy: posting leaflets with your research topic around campus. This may attract some participants, especially if you offer some kind of award - a voucher to a shop or small monetary compensation. But again, it’s hard to reach a big group of people this way and you might go broke in the process.
So what’s the best resolution for finding participants, both in terms of budget, time and quality of the results?
The answer is survey platforms. This is a space designed exclusively for sharing surveys, so people come along with a special goal in mind and engage with questionnaires more willingly. Moreover, survey platforms provide time control and other features, which prevent biases and distortions in gathered data and help to fish out unreliable participants.
From all available survey platforms, we highly recommend using PollPool. It’s free to register and share your survey there, and it’s completely free to get responses. The only rule is, you need to answer surveys made by others. Moreover, PollPool offers time control and response bias control, which helps you in reviewing your answers. PollPool is a family-like community, which gathers students and small-business owners. This means it’s easy to navigate, which distinguishes us from other competitors.
To maximize your chances of getting responses, aside from survey platforms, don’t shy from social media. But use it wisely: join survey-swap groups (here and here), your university forum or other big communities. This way, you reach people from different backgrounds, which you would not necessarily find otherwise.
Regardless of which method you choose, give yourself enough time for collecting the required amount of responses and be very sure to clean your data in advance. Good luck with your survey!
