SENTRY® automatically detects low-quality respondents who would provide bad data and prevents them from entering your study. The system is based on patented technology (U.S. Patent No, 10,572,778) and decades of scientifically-proven cognitive and behavioral research that ensures higher levels of attention, language proficiency, engagement, and effortful response patterns.

Rather than rely on technology alone, SENTRY is the only system that leverages advanced behavioral and technical tools to safeguard your data, ensuring high-quality results you can trust. Additionally, by intelligently selecting quality respondents, the tool maintains hard-to-reach sample diversity while elevating data quality. With SENTRY, you no longer have to worry that you are making inaccurate conclusions and bad decisions because of noisy data.


 

How SENTRY Works

SENTRY measures a potential respondent’s capacity to adequately participate in a survey at a given time, through a series of behavioral measurements proven to promote respondents who are attentive, comprehending, engaged and respond consistently to survey tasks. SENTRY also uses DigiPrint®, our own device fingerprinting solution to manage participants and prevent duplication and fraud. This process takes less than a minute and reduces back-end data cleaning by removing unengaged and fraudulent respondents before they enter a survey.


 

How SENTRY Helps

Removes Noise

Good data leads to good decisions. Noise can obscure truth, and lead to very inaccurate conclusions. We recently analyzed a report by the CDC and found that their conclusions appear to be due to this kind of noise. As you can see below, SENTRY eliminates this noise.

In the past month, have you or a household member engaged in the following behaviors to prevent coronavirus?

 

Very high-risk cleaning practices were almost exclusively reported by respondents who did not pass SENTRY. This indicates that reports of very high-risk cleaning practices are largely due to noise.

 

Better Open-Ended Responses

95% of respondents who pass SENTRY provide quality open-ended data.

 

Sample Response Accuracy

SENTRY only allows participants who are attentive and truthful into your survey. Below you can see ‘Red Herring’ questions that respondents who pass SENTRY are very likely to get correct, while those who fail SENTRY are likely to answer incorrectly.

 

Sample Diversity

Traditional ‘Red Herring’ questions and other attention checks, disproportionately remove minority participants and those with lower education. SENTRY preserves the diversity of these hard-to-recruit groups. The graph below shows that while Socio-economically disadvantaged groups are much more likely to fail some traditional attention checks, SENTRY is not biased against them.

Features & Benefits

  • Behavioral science and technology-based solutions to capture a wide range of bad respondents
  • Flexible system with Multiple Data Quality levels to suit the needs of all types of data collection
  • Data Quality solution for both individual researchers and panel providers who want to identify higher quality respondents
  • Can lower reconciliation rates by >50%

Frequently Asked Questions

 

How Can I Use SENTRY in My Own Research?

SENTRY can be used on any online study via traditional URL redirects or an API integration with your survey software.

How Is SENTRY Different Than Digital Fingerprinting or the Current Tools?

In addition to leveraging IP-duplication blocking as well as advanced risk-analysis techniques to tell humans and bots apart in the background, SENTRY also engages respondents directly with questions proven to ensure fitness to participate in research studies.

What Information Do I Get When I Leverage SENTRY?

Users can receive information about each participant’s performance within SENTRY, as well as overall rates of Passing, Failing, Security Terminations and Time Spent for each project. Data are also available from SENTRY’s cursor-tracking recorder, which allows users to see how respondents interacted with each question.

Is It Customizable for My Projects That Might Need More or Less Security?

We realize that objectives vary from project to project, that’s why SENTRY has multiple levels and configurations that are easy to customize based on your research needs.

To learn more about using SENTRY in your research,
contact us today!

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