Verify a participant's age before the interview starts

In alcohol, nicotine, gambling and some medicines, a minimum age is not a sampling preference. It is a condition of running the study at all. Until now the screener asked for an age band and took the answer on trust, so the one answer that decides whether a person belongs in your study was the one answer nobody checked. Anyone who wanted the incentive could pick a qualifying band and carry on.

How it works

• Add the question. Age verification is a question type in the screener, alongside single-select, multiselect and open text.

• Set a default minimum age. It starts at 18 and you can change it. It applies to every participant whose answer has no rule of its own.

• Add custom rules where the minimum differs. A rule reads the answers to one earlier single-choice question in the same screener section, so the minimum age can follow the market, the product or any other answer you already collect: 21 in the United States, 20 in Japan, 18 everywhere else. You can set one minimum age per answer option, as a whole number from 1 to 120. Rules set a minimum, not an exact age.

• Participants answer twice. They pick the month and year they were born, then type their age in years.

• Conveo compares the two. The age from the date of birth has to agree with the typed age, and it has to meet the minimum for that participant. If either check fails, the participant is screened out before the interview starts.

• It runs before the conversation. The check is a gate in the screener. The AI research assistant that runs the video conversation never sees the result and does not react to it.

The participant flow works on web and mobile. Age verification is behind a feature flag and is not switched on for every workspace yet, so ask your Conveo contact to turn it on for yours.

One answer checks the other

The second question is the point. A single age question is easy to pass: pick the band that qualifies and move on. Two questions about the same fact, in different forms, are harder. Someone who invents a birth year has to remember what they claimed and type a number that agrees with it. Answers that do not line up are screened out the same way an underage answer is.

Age verification in one minute

A 44-second look at one participant card: the age asked twice, a minimum set per market, and the answers that get screened out.

Built for categories where the minimum age is a legal condition

Alcohol, nicotine and vaping, gambling, some medicines and some financial products all set a floor on who may take part, and that floor moves by market. Running one study across several of those markets used to mean one age rule and a manual check afterwards. Now the rule travels with the answer the participant already gave about where they are.

What this means for your research

Fieldwork in an age-restricted category can start from a screener you can describe to a compliance team: two age answers, a documented minimum per market, and a record of who was screened out.

Two limits worth stating. This is still self-reported data. It is not identity verification, so it raises the effort needed to get through and catches answers that contradict each other, and it will not catch someone who lies consistently. Pair it with the quality checks your panel partner runs. And read every rule before you launch: set the default, set a custom rule for each market that needs its own floor, then run a test interview with a qualifying and a disqualifying answer.

Read the screener questions guide for how screening works alongside quotas.