What Are Quotas and What Do They Mean for Your Surveys?

Restricting the number of people who take your survey helps you get a balanced sample of specific responses and the exact amount of data you need. This method of restricting respondents is quota. A quota limits the number of people who can take your survey to ensure manageability and to ensure that targeted research is aimed at specific audiences. Reaching your target audience is nearly impossible using randomized sampling and so researchers opt to utilize systematic selection with participants that are relevant to the survey’s purpose through the use of quotas. The answers that represent quota attributes can be for example aspects like gender, age or interests.

Survey Creators implement conditions in order to prevent certain respondents from participating in a survey. By approaching this matter with inverted logic, quotas can be set to answer options that are assigned the number 0, thus actively screening out the people who select those answer options. Following this method, participants can immediately be excluded from a survey at any desired time along the way. This allows the survey creator or researcher to have more control over the survey and to exclude unwanted opinions. For example, in the skincare industry and my company, in particular, quota sampling is geared towards a more mature demographic of purchasers as we specialize in anti-aging luxury skincare. My company would not want to implement a strategic business decision based on the views and opinions of a minority when it is not representative of the population of our purchasers. In this way, quota sampling is necessary so that the information received can be relevant and guide corporate decisions based on the current and expected consumers of our products.

Advantages of quota control:

1. The researcher received the most highly relevant information on the research topic at hand.
2. Due to the topic at hand, being relevant to the target audience, surveys lead to higher response rates as participants may be more interested and motivated to complete it.
3. There are more time and money saved on resources to go through the findings because responses are limited and relevant to the study at hand.

Disadvantages of quota control:

1. Restriction of the survey can give the impression of bias and lead to the questioning of the quality and validity of the findings.
2. The findings may not represent the general population as the respondents would have been targeted to those relevant to the topic.

Working with quotas allows you to get your surveys to the relevant target audience and allows for useful findings, however, the significance of the results may not be applicable to the general population due to the method of exclusion utilized.