Thank you for your interest in RONIN Studies and our market research studies.
You may be visiting this page for a variety of reasons.
This page is maintained for anyone interested in taking part in market research, or who has been contacted by RONIN to take part in market research. Although we work hard to make sure that taking part in a study is a pleasant and valued experience, we want to make sure you have information available to you to answer our most frequent questions.
If you can't find answer to your question, or if anything on this page is unclear, please do get in touch using the details at the bottom of this page and a member of our team will be pleased to assist.
"Screening" is how we ensure you only take part in studies that are relevant to you, or that you fall into a category of participant that hasn't been filled yet to gather a good mix of views.
To achieve this, we will take you through a "screener", a set of qualification questions used to determine whether the main part of the market research study is a fit, and that we are still looking to collect responses from people that fall into your category. We always endeavour to ask these questions as early as possible, so you don't spend any longer than you need to in this section.
Whilst we always endeavour to only contact you about studies we believe are relevant to you, we need to confirm this is correct.
In other words, two specific purposes:
- Making sure the study is relevant to you, so that you do not waste your time taking part in a study that isn't relevant to you.
- Making sure that the category of participant you fall into, based on the responses you provide during the qualification section (the "screener"), hasn't already been filled.
Please note that, where the responses you provide mean that you cannot be included in the main study, we will not keep your responses and they will be discarded from any reporting, unless you have explicitly agreed otherwise, for example if you have consented to RONIN contacting you about future market research opportunities relevant to you.
We will include qualification questions in every study for the following reasons:
- The criteria for inclusion in a study will vary from project to project, so we always need to check your information against the specification of an individual study, as applicable.
- Circumstances change, so even if we previously asked you a question does not mean that your response is still valid.
- When taking part in a market research study, we also need to tell you about how your personal data will be used and make sure you consent to each purpose relevant to the study. The purpose(s) may change with each project, our responsibility to you is that we inform you about this each and every time. Sometimes, you might not consent to some or all of the purposes, in which case you will not be able to take part.
We understand that the screening process can be frustrating, especially if you spend time answering questions that result in your exclusion from one of our surveys.
- We will always keep these qualification sections to be as as short as possible. We want these questions to take as little of your time as possible to answer.
- Every question should only check whether you are eligible or to check which category you fall into to achieve the study objectives. Sometimes, we might ask these questions to help us prepare for the next stage of the study.
- Because all the questions we ask are designed to check on your eligibility to take part, as soon as your response indicates you are definitely not going to be able to take part, we will stop the screening process to waste as little of your time as possible.
We want to make sure the information we have is completely up-to-date, and we want to give you all the information you need to give your informed consent to the survey.
If you’ve taken part in a lot of market research surveys, you may have noticed that a lot of the screening questions tend to be very similar and repetitive. We’ll often ask questions that you’ve answered many times before and you may find this frustrating; this is why we do it:
- Up-to-date information. A lot of the information we ask you for is liable to change over time. From seniority levels, patient load, specific experience with drugs or contextual information specific to the survey. Asking you these questions helps us confirm you are eligible at the time of participation.
- Legitimacy. Our clients need to know, from you directly, that you are eligible for the research. Market research is an industry driven by compliance and good practice; relying on information that we assume is accurate without getting you to confirm it simply would not be good enough!
- Compliance. When taking part in research, you will often see ‘consent statements’ where we explain what we will do with your data, how will be able to view it, and for what purposes. It is our duty of care to you, as participants to research, to provide you with this information every time that you take part in research. Although you may find this long and overbearing at times, these statements are designed to protect you and your data.
The value of rewards we can offer participants is generally dependent on on how long it will take you, how much effort will be required, or how complex it might be to complete the study.
In some cases, we might have certain thresholds on the value of the reward we can offer you which is determined by the company that commissioned the study. For example, if you are a healthcare professional, every pharmaceutical company will set payment caps that can be deemed reasonable for the time and experience lent by healthcare professionals to market research efforts. We can never exceeed those as this may not comply with their obligations.
We will always be upfront and transparent about the value of the reward we can offer you when giving you an opportunity to take part in a study, so you can decide whether you want to take part or not.
We always do our best to set out how long it might take you to take part in a market research study, but the actual duration will always depend on your specific answers during the study.
It can be difficult for us to accurately estimate the time it will take each participant to complete a study. One reason for this is that everyone spends a different amount of time answering questions. Another reason is that, depending on your answers, you may get more (or less) questions than other participants because your experience might make you eligible for more sections of the study than the average participant.
Our teams keep this under review to check how long people are spending in a study, on average. If we find that, on average, participants are taking longer than anticipated to complete the study, we will amend our information to reflect this, so you can decide whether or not to take part.
Market research is a strictly regulated sector and, in addition to our adherence to applicable laws and regulations, we work in accordance with several codes of conduct, as outlined below.
- Company Partners of the UK Market Research Society (MRS)
- Corporate Members of The British Healthcare Business Intelligence Association (BHBIA)
- Corporate Members of ESOMAR
We are also registered with the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) (Reg. number: ZA219373).
You can always reach out to us through our contact form and we’d be happy to help.