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Quota considerations

Mutually exclusive vs. non-mutually exclusive quotas

Please talk to your Survey Directors if you need capped quotas set up on non-mutually exclusive items as early in the Authoring process as possible.


Events that cannot occur at the same time are mutually exclusive. When setting up capped quotas the exclusivity of what you are counting must be considered. For example, if you are counting the number of respondents of a certain age, this is exclusive since a person can only be one age at a given point in time. However, if you ask about the brands someone buys at a grocery store, the results would be non-mutually exclusive since someone can buy many different brand names simultaneously.

Capping quotas on non-mutually exclusive events can lead to issues if not set up properly. For example, let us say we want to cap respondents purchasing brand A and brand C to 50N but no caps on brand B.

If we set up quotas without considering the exclusivity, once we hit 50N for brand A the respondents purchasing brand A will be terminated but someone might purchase both brand A and brand B, which means we lose N for brand B.

To deal with this issue, we typically set up a variable that filters out brands once the cap has been hit and allows the respondent to proceed if they still have a brand where N is needed.

Warning: The setup for non-mutually exclusive quotas is imprecise because it depends on completion times and the time when a variable is defined. This can easily lead to overages on quota counts, especially when many respondents simultaneously take the survey.