Our inclusion criteria are that participants must be 18 years or older and that they must be able to read and understand English/Afrikaans in order to take part in the study. However, the informed consent and all questionnaires are online, could anyone advise on how we can verify this information, as this needs to be addressed in the ethics application. We could ask ID numbers, however some people are reluctant to provide this, and it can be fabricated as well. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
For the age, you can include it as your first question: “Are you 18 or older? If not, you just thank the respondent, and do not ask any further questions. If you want to double-check, you could also ask for year of birth, and do the arithmetic.
What you do next is include a question where the respondent has to read some text and respond. Then you use this (albeit limited) response sample to estimate the language ability of the respondent. If the answer does not match the range of acceptable answers, you deem that the ability is inappropriate. This time, as the respondent's reply indicates poor language ability, you thank the respondent and do not ask any further questions.
Hi,
You could consider using a “captured audience” - for instance, individuals in colleges or language programmes. This way, you’ll get to visit them and ascertain for yourself the potential respondents’ age (and other factors) prior to conducting the survey.
Or, you could also include one-line or mini texts in your questionnaire to quickly test each respondent’s linguistic ability (with regards to English/Afrikaans) before they can proceed with the rest of the survey.
All the best!
To determine the age of the participant as well as to solve some mathematical equations that indicate the possibility of the scientific participant as well as to put some general questions to know the linguistic level of the participant ... and then allow participation in the questionnaire
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Philosophy
- Ethics