If you've received submissions from participants who appear not to match the prescreening criteria you selected, follow the steps below to determine what happened and decide how to handle the submissions.

First, download the demographic data for your study and compare the participants' prescreening responses with the screeners you applied.

There are two possible outcomes:

If the participants' exported demographic data matches your study's eligibility criteria, but they gave different answers within your survey, this doesn't necessarily mean they were ineligible.

This can happen if:

We recommend contacting the participant to clarify which response is correct. If it turns out there was a genuine misunderstanding, ask the participant to return their submission. This means they won't receive a rejection, and you won't need to pay for unusable data.

If the participant's Prolific prescreening data clearly shows they did not meet your eligibility criteria, or it becomes clear that they knowingly provided inconsistent answers, this may be valid grounds for rejection.

However, you should only reject a submission for inconsistent screening responses if the screening questions in your survey are presented exactly as they appear on Prolific. This helps ensure participants aren't rejected because of differences in wording or subjective interpretations between your survey and the Prolific screener.

If your survey platform supports conditional redirects, you can redirect participants who provide inconsistent screening responses to a custom end-of-survey message asking them to return their submission instead of completing the study.

This approach helps avoid unnecessary rejections while ensuring that only eligible participants' data is included in your final dataset. For more information on setting this up, see our guidance on redirecting participants who fail screening checks.