FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

An aggregated measure of the overall quality of panelists that a panel company delivers to surveys prior to cleaning out the bad actors.

The most consistent complaint since the onset of online Marketing Research has been sample quality. It has been an ongoing struggle to keep up with lazy or outright fraudulent survey respondents.
One of the core challenges is that there is not financial incentive for the panel providers to weed out poor quality respondents. Every person they send through that completes and isn’t removed for quality reasons is of value to them. There is no incentive for them to not send that person through for as many times as they can get away with.

As each survey respondent enters our survey platform we perform device fingerprinting tracking using over 300 data points about the participant’s device. We also evaluate IP Reputation using real-time lookups. This allows us to instantly determine the reputation and risk of a potential of a respondent. Finally, when available we look at email reputation with a review of the syntax and DNS to assess the email validity.
The outcome is an individual FRS for each participant. Based on this score can flag them for further review or auto-terminate their survey activity.
The overall quality score of each panel company will be given based on these individuals. This will provide a performance scale for all of our panel partners on the quality of their sample they provide to Socratic.

The PFI is simply an aggregated score of the FRS for each panelist that is sent from a panel company to complete our surveys. Our system stops the bad actors from completing the surveys, but their FSR is included in the PFI calculation.

Socratic utilizes the FSR to verify the quality of each individual attempting to complete our surveys. Those with a high FSR are automatically removed or flagged for further manual review.
Socratic utilizes the PFI to monitor the quality of sample being provided from each individual panel company. We work with panel companies to improve the quality of respondents they deliver.

Socratic strives to provide the best insights to their clients. Ensuring the participants in the research projects who provide information are actually who they say they are and provide relevant and meaningful responses is a critical part of research operations.
The FRS by Socratic gives clients an additional layer of diligence so the insights from the research have a higher quality and trust.

The FRS is assigned to every respondent who attempts to complete a Socratic sponsored survey.Therefore in turn, the PFI and subsequent panel rankings is updated with fresh data weekly.

Socratic utilizes many panel providers as partners. We often use a mix of different panel companies on each project to avoid single-source bias and ensure we obtain enough quality completed surveys. Because of our different detection approaches, the inclusion of a panel provider with a high PFI means we utilize a smaller number of respondents from that panel (only individuals with a low FRS).

If a panel partner has an increase in their PFI we may temporarily suspend using them and discuss their screening procedures to ensure their sample quality improves. We then assign them to our provide sample to our Omnibus surveys and re-engage them into our client surveys once their PFI increases to an acceptable level.

Socratic’s Panel Fraud Index is based on the research activity completed by Socratic with the different panel partners. If a panel provider is not listed with a PFI, it is because either they have not participated in any research with Socratic or have had a limited amount of sample given to Socratic at this time where a Fraud Risk Score can be calculated.