Survey sample and routing glossary
The vocabulary buyers, suppliers and routers use when they talk about survey sessions.
- Allocation
- A supplier's share of a project, with its own entry link, payout and quota.
- Complete
- A respondent who qualified for a survey and finished it. Code 10 on ResearchDart.
- CPI (cost per interview)
- The price a buyer pays for one complete.
- Deduplication
- Stopping the same person from taking a survey more than once, by respondent ID, device or both.
- Endlink
- The URL a survey sends a respondent to when their session ends. Each outcome has its own endlink.
- Entry link
- The URL a supplier sends a respondent to in order to start a survey session.
- Field period
- The time between a survey going live and closing.
- HMAC signature
- A code calculated from a URL and a shared secret that proves the URL was generated by someone who knows the secret and was not changed.
- Incidence rate (IR)
- The share of respondents who qualify for a survey. ResearchDart reports it as completes divided by completes plus terminates.
- LOI (length of interview)
- How long a respondent takes to complete a survey, usually quoted as the median in minutes.
- Over quota
- A respondent who qualified but arrived after their quota group was full. Code 30 on ResearchDart.
- Postback
- A server-to-server request that tells a supplier how a respondent's session ended.
- Quality terminate
- A respondent removed for data quality reasons such as speeding, failed attention checks or duplicate participation. Code 40 on ResearchDart.
- Quota
- A limit on the number of completes needed from a group, such as women aged 18 to 34.
- RDID
- The ResearchDart session ID passed to the buyer's survey and returned on the endlink.
- Redirect
- Sending a respondent's browser from one URL to another, for example from the survey back to the panel.
- RID
- The respondent ID a supplier uses for a panel member.
- Router
- A system that decides which survey a respondent is sent to and records how the session ended.
- Sample exchange
- A marketplace where buyers and many suppliers transact survey completes through shared routing and APIs.
- Soft launch
- Releasing a survey to a small number of respondents to check timings, incidence and data before full fieldwork.
- Speeder
- A respondent who finishes a survey implausibly fast, typically well under a third of the median LOI.
- Supplier
- A panel, community or app that provides respondents for surveys.
- Terminate
- A respondent who did not qualify for a survey. Also called a screen-out. Code 20 on ResearchDart.