Who answers our surveys

Everything StakeholderWatch reports rests on the people who answer its surveys, so this page says who they are, how they are recruited, how they are checked and what is done with their data.

Recruitment

Respondents are recruited through established online panel bureaus with which StakeholderWatch has standing agreements. We work with several bureaus rather than one, select them against a verification standard, and review each partner's quality continuously. Panel membership is voluntary and incentivised by the bureau; StakeholderWatch does not recruit respondents directly and does not maintain a panel of its own. Where a client's stakeholders cannot be reached through general panels (employees, members, patients), the sample is drawn from the client's own population under an agreement that protects anonymity.

Screening

Every complete passes through StakeholderWatch's own checks before it enters the data: completion time against the questionnaire's expected duration, straight-lining and other low-effort patterns, internal consistency between related items, duplicate devices and sessions, and the response signatures associated with automated and farmed accounts. A complete that fails is removed and the removal is logged. Familiarity with the organisation is screened before any evaluation is asked.

No synthetic data

StakeholderWatch does not use large language models or any other generative method to create, impute or extend respondent answers, and does not use synthetic sampling to fill quotas or segments. Every record in a client's data is a complete from a person who answered the questionnaire. When a panel partner is found to have supplied synthetic or automated completes, the partner is dropped and the affected completes are removed from the data and from every estimate built on them.

Single-client fieldwork

Each study is fielded for one client alone. Respondents answer about one organisation per interview and are not shared between clients' studies.

Data protection

Data are stored in the European Union. Respondent records are pseudonymised at collection; no name, address or contact detail enters StakeholderWatch's systems. Consent is collected per survey by the panel bureau under its own terms and under the GDPR. Clients receive respondent-level data under the anonymity rules agreed for the study; for employee research, those rules are agreed with the works council. See Data protection.