Best questions for clinical trial participants survey about barriers to participation

Here are some of the best questions for a clinical trial participants survey about barriers to participation, along with tips on how to create them. If you want to quickly build a tailored, conversational survey, you can generate one in seconds with Specific.

Best open-ended questions to reveal barriers for participants

Open-ended questions are essential when you want participants to express their true thoughts, feelings, and experiences. They're great for uncovering nuanced barriers that multiple-choice questions might miss. Here are our top 10 open-ended survey questions for clinical trial participants about barriers to participation:

1. What was your biggest concern before deciding to participate in this clinical trial?

2. Can you describe any challenges you faced during the trial that made you consider leaving?

3. What information would have helped you feel more confident about joining?

4. Were there logistical barriers (like transportation or scheduling) that made participation difficult? Please explain.

5. How did your friends, family, or community influence your decision to participate?

6. Have you experienced or witnessed any cultural or language barriers during the trial? Please share details.

7. What could the research team do to make participating in future trials easier for people like you?

8. Did you feel adequately represented in the trial? If not, what was missing?

9. What specific support or resources would have improved your experience?

10. Is there anything else you want to share about obstacles you've encountered as a participant?

Open-ended feedback helps surface unique or unexpected issues, which is especially important for understanding why dropout rates can reach as high as 30% in clinical trials [1].

Best single-select multiple-choice questions for quantifying barriers

Single-select multiple-choice questions are perfect for measuring the prevalence of specific barriers or starting a conversation when people might need a quick way to share common challenges. They also make it easy to compare results across groups, or to quickly identify trends for follow-up exploration.

Question: What was the main reason you considered not participating in this clinical trial?

• Didn’t know enough about the trial

• Concerned about side effects or risks

• Lack of time or inconvenient schedule

• Family or work commitments

• Transportation or location issues

• Other

Question: Did you feel represented by the trial’s participant group (in terms of gender, ethnicity, or background)?

• Yes

• No

• Not sure

Question: How easy was it to understand the information provided about the clinical trial before joining?

• Very easy

• Somewhat easy

• Somewhat difficult

• Very difficult

When to followup with "why?" If someone selects a critical barrier or anything but the most positive answer, ask "why?" to better understand their context. For instance, if a respondent chooses "Transportation or location issues," a follow-up like "Can you tell us more about the difficulties you faced with transportation?" helps dig beneath the surface and surface actionable insights.

When and why to add the "Other" choice? Including "Other" allows participants to share experiences survey creators might not anticipate. A follow-up here might reveal unique barriers—like feeling underrepresented as a minority—that wouldn’t surface otherwise, and can help address underrepresentation or gender disparities reported in trials [2][3].

Should you include an NPS-style question?

NPS (Net Promoter Score) is a simple way of measuring how likely participants are to recommend trial participation to others. It works well for clinical trial participant surveys because it benchmarks overall satisfaction and highlights areas needing improvement. For instance, if your NPS is low, it suggests barriers are significant and widespread. You can build a dedicated NPS survey for clinical trial participants here.

NPS questions also create a great jumping-off point for tailored follow-ups (e.g., "What would make you more likely to recommend participating?"). They're especially valuable for identifying advocacy bottlenecks or points in the process that discourage participation. And with over 70% of patients declining trials due to lack of awareness [1], NPS follow-ups can pinpoint outreach improvements.

The power of follow-up questions

Follow-up questions are essential for surveys about barriers to participation. With dynamic AI follow-up questions (read more about how they work here), you catch ambiguity before it turns into data noise. If someone answers vaguely, the system can dig deeper—immediately—just like an experienced interviewer would.

• Participant: "I almost didn’t join because it was confusing."

• AI follow-up: "Could you share what exactly was confusing about the process—was it the medical language, scheduling, or something else?"

How many followups to ask? Generally, 2-3 follow-ups are enough to gather full context, but Specific lets you set limits or allow respondents to skip ahead once their responses are clear. This keeps the survey flowing and respects participants' time.

This makes it a conversational survey—respondents answer in real time, the interview evolves naturally, and you capture richer context for each insight.

AI response analysis—analyzing all these nuanced, open-ended replies is easy thanks to GPT-powered tools (learn how AI survey analysis works for participant feedback). Even with lengthy, messy responses, you can synthesize barriers, group feedback, and find improvement themes at scale.

These automated, conversational follow-ups are a game-changer. Give it a try—generate your participant survey and watch the difference in engagement and data depth.

How to prompt GPTs for great participant barrier questions

If you want to use ChatGPT or another AI to brainstorm survey questions, start with a simple prompt but always add context for best results. For example:

Basic prompt:

Suggest 10 open-ended questions for clinical trial participants survey about barriers to participation.

You’ll get better results if you specify your audience, your goal, and provide background details, such as:

We’re a research team surveying adult participants who recently joined cancer drug trials. Our goal is to identify barriers they encountered (logistical, emotional, communication). Suggest 10 open-ended questions to uncover detailed insights on these barriers.

Once you have your initial list, you can organize further:

Look at the questions and categorize them. Output categories with the questions under them.

Then, you can dive deeper by category:

Generate 10 questions for categories "Logistical Barriers," "Representation and Inclusion," and "Understanding of Medical Information."

What is a conversational survey (and why AI changes the game)?

A conversational survey uses an AI agent to interact with participants in a natural, chat-like way—asking questions, listening, clarifying, and probing deeper where necessary. Unlike traditional survey forms, the process adapts dynamically to respondents' inputs. Building a survey this way is as simple as chatting your needs and letting the AI handle question logic, tone, and follow-up branching for you. You can see how to create a survey with AI step-by-step if you want to explore this process.

Why use AI for clinical trial participants surveys? It’s almost impossible to plan for every possible barrier. Conversational AI surveys dynamically surface issues, adapt to individual contexts, and engage participants far more than forms do. An AI survey example for barriers to participation might quickly home in on uncommon fears (or trends you hadn't even considered) just by probing a vague initial answer.

Specific is built for this—delivering best-in-class user experience for creators and respondents, so feedback feels effortless and naturally flows into deep insights instead of shallow form fields.

See this barriers to participation survey example now

See for yourself how a conversational survey uncovers what really matters to clinical trial participants—fast, flexible, and designed for easy analysis. Capture barriers to participation in context, surface root causes, and move quickly from feedback to action.