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We haven’t found these paid panels to be any worse than other methods in this regard (and, in fact, some of them actively cull members who don’t give a decent effort, if you notify them about specific cases), but remember that regardless of the methods you use to recruit, you will still need to watch for garbage responses when you analyze your data later. (See Chapter ~, Analysing Results Cleaning the data in Chapter 12.)

While recruitment panels can work well and can save you a lot of time and effort, there are a few questions you should ask before using them:

• Does the panel cover your region?
  If you want participants from a particular province, state, or country, check with the vendor to make sure they have adequate numbers in that region. Panels usually do a good job of covering North America and western Europe, but may be patchy elsewhere.
  
  
• Is the panel likely to include the types of people you want?
  Most commercial recruitment panels consist of consumers. This works well if you’re targeting a portion of the general public, but it’s harder to use consumer panels for other audiences like business people, farmers, government employees, and so on. You may need to find a more suitable source of participants - see “Other ways to recruit” below.
  
  
• Will you need to do additional screening of your own?
  While the criteria you supply to the panel will net you a subset of their members, this may not be specific enough for your study. For example, you may have asked the panel for women aged 40-60 who shop online at least once a month, but you’re really only interested in those who have returned at least one item that they bought online.
  Once you go beyond the criteria that the panel offers, you may find that you need to do additional screening – see “Screening Screening for specific participants” belowparticipants later in this chapter.

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Next: Using integrated recruitment tools

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