What about 'groupies' or 'professional respondents'?

We all know about these people.  Get any bunch of quallies together and the horror stories abound, about the knowing looks, the women on first name terms with the facility hosts, trying to renegotiate incentives during the warm up or questioning you on your use of projective techniques...

Some of them are fairly naive, and don't know that the recruiter who sends them out do different groups every week is deceiving her clients and damaging the whole industry... others are far more collusive and ready to lie and cheat their way into anything they can, say whatever they like, take the money and go.

Estimates vary, but there are probably as many as several hundred people, across the UK, that you NEVER want to see in your research, EVER again... and if they have any sense they'll all be registered with Saros - they'd be daft to miss the chance, given that we advertise openly and reach out for new respondents.  When payment is on offer, sadly there are always people who will resort to dishonesty to get a piece of it.  So how do we minimise their impact on our work and yours?

1.  Through sheer numbers.  If we have 200,000+ members, and few hundred are bent groupies, their damage potential is limited by default - they simply won't get the chance to participate.

2.  Rigid control of attendence/participation history.  Whilst of course we can't do anything about research they may be undertaking for other agencies if they lie to us about it, to their disappointment they won't be able to take part in more than 2 groups a year for us anyway

3. Feedback and tip-offs. We get these from clients, viewing facilities, even fellow respondents... once someone is tagged as a 'groupie' they are off our Christmas card list for keeps.  We observe all data protection legislation within the industry precisely, but there are ways of sharing learning to prevent fraud (because that's what it is - obtaining incentive monies by deception)

4. Careful database analysis and de-duplication.  Without publishing too many details, it's hard for 'multiple personalities' to get past us - though we're always astonished by the lengths some people go to in trying.

5. Avoiding the 'recruiter network' - we ONLY recruit from our own database or directly from a client's list, we don't outsource to freelance recruiters.   We know there are some fantastic ones out there doing a difficult job as well as possible... but we also know that standards vary wildly

6.  Bookers not recruiters - our research bookers work only for us, and their training includes identifying, testing and tagging the groupies that inevitably emerge - both the naive ones (they're easy), and the professionals (more of a challenge - but we love a challenge)

7.  Requiring validation.  For example, we will suggest asking all respondents to bring their car documents to the research, or their mobile phone (AND contract!), or the respective credit card, or whatever factor that their recruitment is dependent upon. 

Between us we can seriously limit the damage this small and irritating group of people do to the credibility of our industry and the quality of the outputs obtained in research.