Study Groups (Step 1c)

Study Groups is the third step of the Brief. Here you turn the demographics and screeners you just defined into segments — each with its own persona and tailored scenes. See Study groups (concept) for the underlying idea; this page is the how-to.

What this step is for

To split your audience into meaningful segments so each kind of respondent gets a relevant survey — while every segment stays measured on the same scales for comparability. Groups are optional: skip them for a single undifferentiated audience.

How to do it

1. Choose Add Study Group.
2. Give the group a name — for example, Millennial Male or Metro Gen-Z.
3. Define its conditions using your demographic choice-fields and/or screener answers (e.g. region = Metro and age_band = 18-26 and gender = Male).
4. Repeat for each segment you want to tailor for.
5. Mark one group as the default (see below).

Set a default group

A respondent whose answers match no group’s conditions needs somewhere to go. Mark one group as the default so those respondents still get a survey. If you define groups but set no default, respondents who match nothing would see no questions — vDynamiq warns you when this is the case.

If you define no groups at all, vDynamiq uses a single implicit “All Respondents” group — everyone qualified takes the same survey.

Best practices

• Segment on things that change the story, not everything you collected. You don’t need a group for every demographic combination — only the splits that warrant different framing.
• Keep conditions mutually clear. Overlapping conditions make routing ambiguous; aim for segments a respondent falls cleanly into.
• Always designate a default the moment you have more than one group.
• Fewer, meaningful groups beat many thin ones. Each group is a persona and a set of scene variants to review — and very small segments yield noisy results.

Tips

• Group conditions read from choice demographic fields and screener answers — make sure the attributes you want to segment on were defined as choice fields in Audience.
• Name groups the way you’ll talk about them in the readout (Metro Gen-Z Male), so results are easy to discuss later.
• You can revisit groups after seeing the personas — if a persona feels off, the group definition is often the thing to adjust.

What happens next

Once your groups are set, vDynamiq generates one persona per group, and later gives each scene a variant per group.

Where to go next

• Measurement — define what the study measures.
• Personas — review the character generated for each group.
• Study groups (concept) — the idea behind segments.