Market Researchers in general and Saros Research in particular can seem to do nothing but ask you questions! Some of these are quite personal, but all are for good reason.

When you register with Saros you will be asked to complete our basic registration form, and you will also have the opportunity to tell us more about specific areas such as your health or communications gadgets, if research invitations in that area are of specific interest to you. We use the information on these forms to try to match you to the most appropriate research event invitations, the ones that you are most likely to be a good match for and motivated to apply for.

A lot of our registration questions can seem very personal - we ask about your ethnicity, your income, details of your family, for example. We completely understand that you may feel uncomfortable sharing that information with us, but we promise you we will keep it securely stored, and not do anything unethical with it. We don't even share it with our clients, in any way that is associated with your name and identification.

We use details like your location and travel habits to try to match you to research opportunities close to where you live or work, but sometimes our clients have more complicated requirements and we can use your other data to target our invites even more closely. Our clients may need to speak to only people with children under 5, or who rent their home, or who only use certain categories of skincare daily... which is why we have developed our supplementary registration form process. Of course, you are perfectly at liberty to omit /not answer any questions that you are not comfortable with - this may limit the projects we can match you to, but very few of our registration questions are compulsory, so long as we can contact you what else you share is wholly within your control.

The more sensitive information you share with us, we use in ways that are appropriate to the research requirements only: one example is a client researching packaging for a new brand of afro hair care products who is only interested in the opinions of people with afro hair who know the competitor brands well. Or we might be recruiting on behalf of a public sector organisation that is required to ensure they research all segments of the population consistently. Some of our clients make adaptive technology and other products for disabled people, or medical equipment of use and interest only to people with certain specific conditions, so that's why we ask about your health and disabilities (we do not recruit for medical trials, incidentally, even our patient research is about marketing and communications aspects only). We also use information you have shared about any disability to ensure that any adaptations are in place to help you participate fully in a research event, such as induction loops and wheelchair access.

Even once you have registered with us though we still ask questions, whenever you apply for an event! This is because we cannot know everything about you from your registration, and still need to know things that are specific to a project, or that might change frequently, such as which supermarkets you have visited in the past month. We are designing our questionnaire software to work in ever smarter ways to avoid you having to tell us the same information repeatedly, and make the project application process as painless as possible for all applicants, whilst at the same time making sure our clients get the precisely-recruited people they have commissioned us to find.

So, we are sorry about all the questions! But that is really what research is all about...