Consent Forms

Great Question gives you two ways to collect consent before someone takes part in your research: the built-in consent checkboxes that ship with every study, and custom PDF consent forms for organizations that need their own legal language.

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Standard consent checkboxes

Every study includes consent by default. Before joining, participants must check the required boxes:

• “I understand that my data is stored for research purposes[, for [Company Name]]”
• “I understand that I can request for my research participation data to be deleted at any time”

There is also an optional opt-in box, “I opt-in to being contacted for future studies,” that participants can choose to accept. This built-in consent works for most studies and requires no setup.

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Custom consent forms

Custom consent forms let you upload a PDF with your organization’s own legal language and collect a signature from each participant. To upload a custom form:

1. Go to Settings > Legal.
2. Click Attach file.
3. Upload a PDF file.

When you configure a form, you choose which fields participants fill in. Name, Email, Title, Address, and Phone Number are all optional, while a Signature is always required.

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Consent transfer settings

You can control whether participants re-sign your form for every study or whether a prior signature carries over:

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Setting a default form

To attach a form to new studies automatically, click Set as default on any consent form in Settings > Legal.

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Team-scoped forms

If your organization uses teams, you can upload consent forms specific to each team under Settings > Teams > [Team Name] > Legal. This lets different teams use their own legal language.

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Viewing signed forms

You can access signed consent forms from several places:

• A participant profile, in the Consent section
• A candidate’s panel profile — this view shows up to 5 signed forms
• A bulk export from a study’s participant list — this downloads a single zip file containing every signed PDF, rather than individual records with details

Where individual records are shown (participant profile and panel profile), each one lists the filename, the signing date and time, the associated study, and a download option.

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Troubleshooting

Issue	What’s Happening	How to Fix
Studies revert to the standard checkboxes after I delete a custom form	Deleting a form doesn’t check which studies use it first — every study pointing at that form falls back to Great Question’s default consent checkboxes immediately.	Before deleting a form, check which studies use it. There’s no undo, so reassign or pause those studies first if you need to keep using custom consent.
Need to change the PDF on an existing form	You can edit a form’s team, default status, expiration window, and included fields, but not the uploaded PDF itself.	Upload a new form with the updated PDF and set it as default (or reassign studies to it), then delete the old one once nothing depends on it.
A candidate’s panel profile or the API only shows 5 signed forms	Both the panel profile view and the public API cap out at a candidate’s 5 most-recently-signed forms.	For a candidate’s full signing history, use the bulk export from a study’s participant list instead.
A participant’s booking failed or froze right after signing a custom form	This can happen on studies where signing the form is a required step before booking.	Have the participant refresh and retry the booking. If it keeps failing, contact support with the participation ID rather than resubmitting repeatedly.
Want to be notified when someone signs a form	There’s no in-app notification for individual signings.	Use the consent_form.signed webhook event to react to signings programmatically instead of checking manually.

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Still need help? Contact us at support@greatquestion.co — median response time is 19 minutes during support hours.