Here are some of the best questions for a clinical trial participants survey about informed consent understanding, plus tips for designing them. You can quickly build your own conversational survey with Specific’s AI—no guesswork required.
Best open-ended questions for clinical trial participants about informed consent understanding
Open-ended questions are essential for uncovering real insights from clinical trial participants—especially when you want to go beyond surface-level responses. These questions encourage thoughtful, nuanced feedback and can reveal gaps in understanding that may not appear with fixed options. They’re especially powerful when exploring sensitive or complex topics like informed consent, where thorough comprehension is critical.
They help you capture context, concerns, and specifics in participants’ own words.
They’re ideal after multiple-choice questions to clarify or deepen answers.
They expose common misunderstandings—vital for ethics and ongoing improvement.
10 top open-ended questions for your clinical trial informed consent understanding survey:
In your own words, what do you believe is the main purpose of this clinical trial?
How was the concept of "randomization" explained to you, and how confident do you feel that you understood it?
What information about potential risks, side effects, or discomforts stood out most to you?
Were there any terms or concepts in the consent form that you found confusing or unclear? Please describe them.
If you wanted to withdraw from the trial, how would you go about doing so, and what do you think would happen next?
Did you feel that the voluntary nature of your participation was made clear? Please explain your experience.
How do you understand the idea of a "placebo" in this study, and what questions did you have about it (if any)?
What, if anything, would have made the consent process easier for you to understand?
Were alternative treatments discussed with you? How well did you understand your options?
Is there anything else you wish you had known or had explained differently before agreeing to join the trial?
Open-ended questions are especially useful when participant comprehension is known to vary—systematic review data shows that understanding of concepts like placebo and randomization is substantially lower (just above 50%) compared to other elements, such as freedom to withdraw or the study’s nature (around 75%). [1]
Best single-select multiple-choice questions for clinical trial participants about informed consent understanding
Single-select multiple-choice questions are great for when you need quantifiable data or want to ease participants into the survey with low-effort choices. These are useful for benchmarking participant understanding and can be paired with follow-ups to dig deeper later. Sometimes, offering options helps participants organize their thoughts—prompting clarity, which you can then enrich with targeted open-ended probes.
Question: How confident are you that you understood the risks and side effects explained during the informed consent process?
Very confident
Somewhat confident
Not very confident
Not confident at all
Question: Were you told you could withdraw from the trial at any time without penalty?
Yes, definitely
I think so, but not clearly
No, it was not mentioned or was unclear
Other
Question: Which key aspect of the consent process was most difficult for you to understand?
The study’s purpose
Randomization or placebo
Risks and side effects
Confidentiality
Alternative treatments
Other
When to follow up with "why?" Often, if someone selects "Not very confident" or "The study’s purpose," immediately asking "Could you tell us more about what made it hard to understand?" is the key to actionable insights. These open up new perspectives and clarify the root of confusion.
When and why to add the "Other" choice? Including "Other" lets you catch unique or unexpected responses that don’t neatly fit your preset options. A smart follow-up—"Please describe what else you found difficult to understand"—often uncovers important issues you might otherwise have missed.
NPS: A net promoter score question for clinical trial participants
Net Promoter Score (NPS) questions work surprisingly well in clinical trials to measure overall satisfaction with the informed consent process. This format—“How likely are you to recommend this trial experience to another potential participant, based on your understanding of the consent process?” (on a 0–10 scale)—gives a single, easily benchmarked metric that is recognized and actionable. It also prompts revealing comments when followed by “why?” for both low and high scores.
Try launching an NPS survey for clinical trial participants about informed consent understanding—it’s built for fast set-up and deep post-survey analysis.
The power of follow-up questions
Follow-up questions are where conversational AI surveys truly excel. With automated follow-ups, you’re not just collecting initial reactions—you’re unearthing context, digging into root causes, and clarifying partial answers in the same conversational flow. This means higher-quality insights and far less back-and-forth or manual data cleaning later.
Clinical trial participant: “I didn’t really get the randomization part.”
AI follow-up: “Can you describe what part of randomization felt unclear for you?”
Without this follow-up, you’d only know there was confusion— not how, why, or what could help improve understanding.
How many follow-ups to ask? Two to three follow-ups is often enough for most topics, especially if each probe is focused. Specific lets you set criteria: if you collect enough information, the AI automatically moves on to the next question for an efficient experience.
This makes it a conversational survey: The ability to clarify, dig deeper, and naturally guide the respondent results in a conversation—not a static form. This is what makes conversational surveys from Specific so smooth and effective.
AI survey analysis: Even with lots of text from open-ended questions and follow-ups, it’s simple to analyze your survey responses using AI. All themes and insights are surfaced without manual coding.
Try generating a clinical trial participants survey and see how dynamic follow-up questions transform the process.
How to prompt ChatGPT (or GPTs) to generate insightful clinical trial survey questions
AI is a phenomenal aid for creating surveys on complex topics. Here’s how to get the most out of GPT-based assistants.
Start with a simple prompt:
Suggest 10 open-ended questions for clinical trial participants survey about informed consent understanding.
But the more context you give—the better the results. For example:
You are an expert in clinical research ethics. Suggest 10 open-ended and 5 multiple-choice questions for a survey designed for clinical trial participants, focused on how well they understood key aspects of the informed consent form, such as risks, randomization, placebo, and withdrawal rights. Include explanations for why each question matters.
Once you have draft questions, ask the AI to organize and refine:
Look at the questions and categorize them. Output categories with the questions under them.
Then, zoom into specific gaps in understanding (like confidentiality or placebo):
Generate 10 questions for categories: Randomization, Placebo, Risks and Side Effects.
Iterative prompting like this is how we at Specific rapidly design targeted conversational surveys.
What is a conversational survey?
A conversational survey is a new type of AI-driven feedback tool that mimics real human dialogue. Instead of bombarding participants with static forms, it meets them in a chat interface—prompting responses, probing for clarity, and building on each exchange for richer, more contextual responses. That’s a big leap from old-school static survey forms, which can frustrate or fatigue both researchers and participants.
Manual Survey Creation | AI-Generated Survey (Conversational) |
|---|---|
Hours (or days) drafting and revising questions | Survey created in seconds by chatting with AI |
Rigid logic, little personalization | Dynamically adapts to each respondent’s answers |
Follow-ups require manual outreach | Automated AI follow-ups probe for full context |
Low completion and engagement rates | 70–90% completion rates with conversational AI [3] |
Manual theme analysis | AI-powered, real-time response analysis |
Why use AI for clinical trial participants surveys? AI-powered surveys significantly boost engagement and data quality. Studies show that completion rates for conversational surveys range from 70–90%, versus 10–30% with traditional tools. [3] AI also helps bridge comprehension gaps by providing on-the-fly clarifications and tailored feedback—something critical when 30–50% of participants still misunderstand key concepts like randomization and placebo. [1][2]
If you want to know how to actually make a survey, here’s a no-nonsense guide to creating a clinical trial participants conversational survey about informed consent understanding—from prompt to launch, step by step.
Specific delivers best-in-class user experience for conversational surveys, making both creation and response seamless—resulting in deeper insights and a far better process for researchers and participants alike.
See this informed consent understanding survey example now
See what real, actionable feedback looks like with Specific’s AI-powered, conversational surveys for clinical trial participants. Experience richer insights, conversational flow, and higher completion rates—start building actionable, participant-friendly surveys in seconds.