Study groups

Study groups are how vDynamiq segments your audience so that different kinds of respondents get a survey tailored to them. A study group is a named audience segment defined by conditions on a respondent’s screener and demographic answers. Groups are the bridge between who a respondent is and what experience they receive — and they’re the source from which personas are generated.

This is one of the most important concepts in vDynamiq: get your groups right and every downstream layer — personas, scenes, and comparability — follows naturally.

What a study group is

A group has:

• A name — a human label for the segment, for example Metro Gen-Z Male or Rural Female.
• Conditions — rules on demographic choice-fields and/or screener answers that decide who belongs to the group.
• A tailored track — the persona and per-group scene variants that respondents in this group experience.

When a respondent finishes the screener and demographics, vDynamiq evaluates the group conditions against their answers and routes them into the matching group’s tailored survey.

An example

Suppose you’re researching an electric scooter across very different audiences. You might define groups like this:

Group	Conditions (from demographics / screener)
Metro Gen-Z Male	Location = Metro and Age = 18–26 and Gender = Male
Rural Female	Location = Rural and Gender = Female
Working Professional	Employment = Salaried and Age = 27–45

A respondent who answers Metro, 22, Male falls into Metro Gen-Z Male and receives that group’s persona and scenes. A respondent who answers Rural, Female falls into Rural Female and gets a completely different, relevant framing — while both are measured on the same constructs and scales, so their results stay comparable.

Respondent answersMetro · 22 · Male

→

Matches groupMetro Gen-Z Male

→

ReceivesThat group's persona + tailored scenes

Why groups matter

• Relevance. Each segment experiences a survey framed for their world, which lifts engagement and the honesty of answers.
• One persona per group. vDynamiq generates a persona for each group, giving the narrative a concrete character to speak to.
• Comparability is preserved. Groups change the framing, never the measurement — every group’s scenes measure the same constructs and metrics on the same scales. See Responses & aggregation for how per-group results roll up and compare.

The default group and unmatched respondents

Because group membership is decided by conditions, you have to account for respondents who match no group:

• Set a default group. One group can be marked as the default. Any qualified respondent whose answers don’t match a specific group’s conditions is routed to the default, so they always have a survey to take.
• If no default is set, a respondent who matches no group would have no questions to answer — so vDynamiq warns you to designate a default when you have multiple groups.
• If you define no groups at all, vDynamiq uses a single implicit “All Respondents” group — every qualified respondent takes the same survey. This is the right choice when your audience doesn’t need segmenting.

Groups depend on demographics and screeners

Groups are built on top of your audience definition, so the order of setup matters:

1 · Define screener + demographic questionsThe raw attributes and qualifiers you'll segment on.

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2 · Define study groupsName each segment and set its conditions on those attributes; mark a default.

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3 · vDynamiq generates a persona per groupEach group gets a character, and scenes get a variant per group.

Because of this dependency, you set up screeners and demographics first, then groups. See Building a survey for the step-by-step, and Screener questions for the qualifying layer groups build on.

Where to go next

• Personas & segments — the character generated for each group.
• Screener questions — the qualifying and demographic answers group conditions read.
• Scenes — how each group gets a tailored variant of a measured moment.