Dispositions (Informative)
A disposition is the final category DQC assigns to each response — for example Qualified Complete, OSQ, or Duplicate. You do not send dispositions. DQC derives them from the status you send plus the quality signals (device score, data trust score, persona, duplicate flag, and any failures) already collected. This page is a reference so you know how your data maps.
DQC uses nine dispositions across three categories. For the complete definitions, see Dispositions — full taxonomy, the platform-wide reference outside the Decipher section.
📌 The decision map
DQC maps what the response reports — its status, terminationReason, markers and quality
signals. Read the table top to bottom: the first row that matches decides the disposition.
| Rule | Decipher status | Signal | → DQC disposition |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | any | a terminationReason of duplicate | Duplicate |
| 1 | Terminated | a dqc_duplicate_termination marker | Duplicate |
| 2 | any | the Toolbox never evaluated the response | see below |
| 3 | Overquota | — | Overquota |
| 4 | Partial (answered ≥1 question, then left) | — | Abandon |
| 5 | Qualified | any quality check tripped | Flagged Complete |
| 5 | Qualified | no quality check tripped | Qualified Complete |
| 6 | Terminated | device score of 10 or below | OSQ |
| 6 | Terminated | a DQC device score, data trust score or persona termination | OSQ |
| 6 | Terminated | no terminationReason set, but a dqc_*_termination marker present | OSQ |
| 6 | Terminated | anything else — your own screener | Did Not Qualify |
The last row is the one most responses land on. Any <term> of your own — an age screener, a
quota condition, a knowledge question — reports as Terminated with an empty terminationReason
and no DQC marker, and a respondent screened out by your criteria did not qualify.
OSQ covers the three quality terminations DQC triggers — device score, data trust score and persona — plus any terminate carrying a device score of 10 or below, whoever ended the survey. The fourth DQC termination, duplicate, has a disposition of its own.
A duplicate flag is not a Duplicate. isDuplicate only means "we have seen this participant
before". It becomes the Duplicate disposition only when the response reports a duplicate
termination — a terminationReason of duplicate, or a dqc_duplicate_termination marker on a
Terminated response. A repeat participant who completes normally, reporting no duplicate
termination, is a Flagged Complete; one screened out by your age question is a Did Not Qualify.
A respondent who finished is never OSQ. OSQ is decided only on a Terminated response —
someone who completes the interview with a low device score gets a DQC, Fraud failure and a
Flagged Complete instead. The reverse does not hold: a Terminated response with a device score
of 10 or below is OSQ even when your own screener ended the survey.
In both cases DQC maps what the response reports, not what happened in the interview.
A response can trip more than one signal — a duplicate that also has a low device score, for example. The rules are applied in the order of the table above and the first match wins. Whichever rule decides the disposition, every failure is still stored, so nothing is lost.
What counts as "a quality check tripped"
For a Qualified response, any of these makes it a Flagged Complete instead of a Qualified Complete:
- a custom failure you sent —
honeyPot,trapQuestion,openEndQuestion,other - a device score of 10 or below
- the duplicate flag, even when no termination fired
- a keyboard masher persona
A response with none of them is a Qualified Complete.
🔁 When the Toolbox couldn't evaluate a response
Sometimes the Toolbox never gets to score a respondent — the submission arrives too quickly, the request is blocked, or the wrapper is tampered with. Those responses reach DQC with a placeholder message in place of the participant id, scores and country.
DQC does not read the placeholder score as a failing score. A score of 0 there means "never
measured", not "failed". With the device branch suppressed, the status decides — unless a duplicate
termination was reported, which still outranks it:
| Decipher status | → DQC disposition |
|---|---|
| Partial | Abandon |
| Qualified | Flagged Complete, with an Other failure |
| Terminated | Did Not Qualify |
| Overquota | Overquota |
The Other failure is attached so the flag carries a reason — the response is flagged because it
could not be evaluated, not because a specific check failed.
A response that carries neither decipherSurveyIdentifier nor a usable surveyId cannot be
attributed to a survey, and DQC holds it back rather than filing it under a placeholder name. Both
values are sent automatically by the current integration — see
Which survey the response came from — so this only affects
surveys running an older version of the script.
How the signals get there
- Status (
Overquota/Qualified/Terminated/Partial) comes from your Decipher survey markers — see Howstatusis derived. dqcFraud/dqcDuplicateare computed by DQC from the device/trust/persona/duplicate data the Toolbox sends — see Automatic and custom failures. You can optionally act on them with Termination Scripts.terminationReasonidentifies which DQC termination fired, and is empty for your own terminations. On aTerminatedresponse it is one of three things that produce an OSQ — the others are a device score of 10 or below, and adqc_*_terminationmarker with no reason set.markerscarries every marker on the response, your own screener conditions included. DQC reads it as the fallback whenterminationReasonis empty.- Custom failures you send (
honeyPot,trapQuestion, …) flag the response as a Flagged Complete.
✅ Summary
- Dispositions are computed by DQC — you don't send them.
- Your status + quality signals (scores, duplicate, failures) determine the disposition via the map above, first match wins.
- A terminated response with no DQC signal at all is a Did Not Qualify — that covers your own screeners.
- OSQ is only ever assigned to a terminated response; a completed one is flagged instead.
- All failures are stored even when a response maps to a single disposition.
- See Dispositions — full taxonomy for the definitions of all nine.