Best questions for clinical trial participants survey about communication with study team

Here are some of the best questions for a clinical trial participants survey about communication with the study team, plus key tips on how to create them. With Specific, you can build this type of survey in seconds, using an AI generator tailored to your needs.

Best open-ended questions to ask in a clinical trial participants survey about communication with the study team

Open-ended questions are powerful—they unlock detail and give us context beyond simple yes or no answers. We recommend them whenever you want honest stories, unfiltered feedback, and specific improvement areas.

1. Describe a recent interaction you had with the study team. What went well or could have been better?

2. What information do you wish the study team had explained more clearly?

3. Can you share any challenges you experienced when trying to reach someone from the study team?

4. How would you improve the way the study team communicates with you?

5. What questions or concerns have you had during the trial that you didn’t feel comfortable asking?

6. Tell us about a time when a member of the study team made the process easier for you.

7. Is there anything you wish had been communicated sooner during the study?

8. How do you prefer to receive updates or information from the study team?

9. Describe any misunderstandings that may have occurred due to communication with the study team.

10. What advice would you give to future trial participants regarding communication with the study team?

Open-ended prompts like these invite richer answers and context—a key reason why surveys among clinical trial participants can achieve response rates as high as 41% to 70%, far exceeding the average for general outpatient surveys. [1][2] This higher engagement means you’ll gather even more actionable insights when you ask thoughtful, conversational questions.

Best single-select multiple-choice questions for clinical trial participants about communication with the study team

Single-select multiple-choice questions are best when you need to quantify experiences or make it easier for participants to respond quickly. They’re an excellent intro to start a conversation—sometimes picking from a shortlist helps participants organize their thoughts, or makes a survey feel less overwhelming at first.

Question: How satisfied were you with the overall communication from the study team?

• Very satisfied

• Satisfied

• Neutral

• Dissatisfied

• Very dissatisfied

Question: What was your primary method of communicating with the study team?

• Email

• Phone call

• In-person

• Online portal

• Other

Question: How often did you feel well-informed about your role and responsibilities in the trial?

• Always

• Most of the time

• Sometimes

• Rarely

• Never

When to follow up with "why?" Asking "why" as a follow-up is most useful when you want to uncover root causes or reasons behind a particular choice. For instance, if someone selects "Dissatisfied," an immediate "Can you share what made you dissatisfied with the communication?" invites richer feedback and directs the conversation toward actionable improvement areas.

When and why to add the "Other" choice? Adding "Other" is crucial when you want to avoid hemming people in or missing unexpected channels or experiences. Always follow up on “Other”—for example, if someone selects "Other" for communication channel, follow up with "Please specify what method you used." This can uncover insights not on your radar and ensure your survey adapts to participant reality.

Remember—using a strategic mix of question types also helps maximize response rates, and employing follow-up strategies (like automated probing questions) can further boost participation and the depth of data you capture.[3][4]

Net Promoter Score (NPS) question for clinical trial participants about communication with the study team

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a standardized metric that asks respondents to rate the likelihood they would recommend something—here, the communication with their study team—on a scale of 0 to 10. This makes sense for clinical trial participant surveys about communication because it produces a simple, comparable metric that tracks sentiment over time, and is widely used in research settings for tracking participant satisfaction across cohorts and studies. Want to try a ready-made NPS survey? Generate it instantly.

The power of follow-up questions

Great surveys don’t just capture first answers — they dig deeper automatically, much like the AI follow-up questions feature in Specific. Asking natural, context-aware follow-ups in real time means you resolve ambiguity, probe for actionable detail, and make each participant feel truly heard. Automated follow-ups also save tons of time compared to emailing or scheduling clarifications, letting you gather layered feedback in one seamless session.

• Participant: “Sometimes I had to wait for a reply.”

• AI follow-up: “Can you tell me more about how long you typically waited, and whether this impacted your experience?”

This approach improves the clarity and quality of your data—a key strategy since survey response rates increase when participants are actively engaged, and combining multiple follow-up methods has been shown to lift response rates by 70% or more.[4] In contrast, relying only on static initial questions often leads to vague responses that require extra time to interpret or revisit.

How many followups to ask? In general, 2–3 targeted follow-up questions are enough to reach full context while keeping things concise. With Specific, you can set a limit, and enable the conversation to skip to the next topic once you’ve gathered enough insight. This keeps things user-friendly.

This makes it a conversational survey—respondents feel like they’re chatting with an attentive researcher, not filling out a cold form, which fosters honesty and richer feedback.

AI analysis of survey responses. Despite the qualitative data generated by open-ended and follow-up questions, analyzing responses is now easy. AI-powered tools (like Specific’s analysis feature) make sense of unstructured responses, identifying trends, summarizing feedback, and highlighting areas for improvement. Even when you collect hundreds of stories, AI summarization turns chaos into clarity.

The best way to understand how this new wave of conversational, automated probing works is to generate a survey yourself and interact with it—see how fast you dig deeper and how natural it feels for the respondent.

Prompting ChatGPT or other GPTs to generate strong survey questions

If you want to use ChatGPT (or any advanced language model) to help brainstorm questions, providing a clear prompt is critical. Start with your objective, audience, and context for best results.

For a simple jumpstart, use:

Suggest 10 open-ended questions for clinical trial participants survey about communication with the study team.

If you add a few sentences about your specific context, you’ll get much more targeted and helpful ideas. For example:

We are designing a feedback survey for adults participating in clinical trials. Our main goal is to improve the way study teams communicate about schedules, risks, updates, and participant well-being. Please suggest 10 open-ended questions that encourage honest, detailed answers.

After you get your questions, ask for categories:

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

Then, based on the categories most relevant to you, prompt the AI for deeper dives:

Generate 10 questions for categories “clarity of updates” and “responsiveness of the study team”.

This method sharpens your survey content further—and mirrors how Specific’s AI survey generator works under the hood, using expert-designed prompt engineering for fast results.

What is a conversational survey (and why AI survey generation changes everything)?

Conversational surveys are modern surveys made for dialogue—they don’t simply ask a question and wait for a static answer, but use real-time probing to get the full story in a format that feels like chatting with a smart interviewer.

Here’s how conversational surveys differ from traditional forms in practice:

The result? Better data and happier respondents—especially in nuanced settings like clinical trials where every perspective matters and context is everything. If you’d like a step-by-step guide, see our in-depth tutorial on how to create a clinical trial participant survey about communication.

Why use AI for clinical trial participant surveys? Clinical trials garner above-average response rates, and good follow-up design can raise them even further. AI survey tools not only make drafting, deploying, and analyzing these surveys much easier—they help you maximize your most valuable asset: respondent engagement and the quality of feedback. Try an AI survey example yourself and see the difference in both respondent and researcher experience. For rapid, professional conversational surveys, Specific leads the way with best-in-class user experience for both teams and participants.

See this Communication With Study Team survey example now

Start collecting actionable, context-rich feedback with conversational surveys that unlock insights traditional surveys miss. Get your questions live in seconds, personalize the flow, and discover better ways to communicate with your clinical trial participants today.