I have a question regarding the use of individualized questionnaires for each participant in one study.
The aim of the study is to evaluate the development of children.
I will involve the perspective of the child, parent en professional.
Each of them will receive “kind of” the same questionnaire every week (during one year).
I need 3 types of questionnaires (one for children, one for parents, and one for professionals).
Since each of these children has different characteristics (e.g., age, brothers/sisters), I have to design a questionnaire for each child (or every group of children with the same characteristics).
It might also be that I have to change questions during the data collection (for certain children)
So, I thought it would be most suitable to have a project for every child, parent, professional (90 project for 90 participants). One of your colleagues mentioned that this may raise technical issues.
What would the best approach?
Hi, I would suggest using survey criteria instead. You can have an initial page in your survey which asks questions to determine the age/group of the participant and then based on their responses to that question decide which pages of the survey be shown to them. Please read the Flow Control section for more info.
Thank you for your response. That could be an option, but I think this might increase the dropout rate. My target population is hard to find en hard to keep motivated. It might be annoying to answer questions about brothers/sisters - yes/no, child/parent, for longer than one year. This will influence the results.
Are there more options?
In addition, it could also be that one professional has to answer questions about three children (on one smartphone). Therefore, I think I need multiple projects or is there another way to solve this problem?
Designing this within one study has extra benefits of easier maintenance and a shared domain for any study wide changes, while splitting this to separate studies makes sense if these are inherently unrelated questionnaires targeted for different groups of participants.
On the other side I don’t see how it can be annoying or influence the results, let’s say we have 5 different groups and need to show different survey to each one. The way to do this is to design an initial survey which asks about the group the participant belongs to. Note that this survey is only presented once when they join the study. On the other hand we need to design 5 other surveys one per group type. Then for each one of these 5 surveys set the criteria to match that specific group type, that means only participants who identified themselves as group A will see the survey for group A for the rest of the study, and so on for the rest of the groups.
Thank you! An initial survey would be great. How can I install an initial survey?
I know how to work with criteria in one questionnaire, but I can’t find any specific information about the initial survey. Further, how can I deal with the following:
“it could be the case that one professional has to answer questions about three children (three questionnaires on one smartphone).”
Is it still possible to use one project?
Now you can achieve the same results by adding a Time TL to your survey, set the Base Time to Study Registration Time, and set both the lower and upper bound to 0d 00:00:100:
If you need to show a survey multiple times per number of children and it’s ok to ask the number of children every time you could use loop pages otherwise if prefer to ask the number of children only once at the beginning of study, you could assume a max number of children to support for example let’s say 5, and create 5 separate surveys for child number 1 to 5 and set a criteria on either one to enable it if the selected number of children is greater than or equal to the surveys child number. For example if the survey id asking the number of children is 8989, and that question_id is 1, survey for child #1 would have a criteria like: Q8989_1 >= 1 and survey for child #3 criteria is Q8989_1 >= 3 meaning this survey only enables if participant’s selected number of children in survey 8989 question 1 has been greater than or equal to 3.
Thank you for the information.
If I understand it correctly I have to use the Eligibility TL.
And do I have to design seperate surveys (e.g., initial survey, survey a,b,c,d,e)?
Eligibility is for when you want to let only certain types of people allowed to participate in the study, it’s not what you want as if user is not eligible means they won’t be able to join the study. You need a Time TL with the description is sent above as your baseline survey. And then yes you need to design separate surveys for different groups and set their criteria so each survey only trigger for it’s specific group.
I have a additional question regarding the use of criteria.
I used Q5016_2==1 (5016=baseline) as criteria for my weekly survey, thus (Q[surveyid]_[question]).
Unfortunately the survey doesn’t work when using criteria. (ID surveys: 5016 and 4796)
Did I make a mistake?
Hi Ymke, I checked your surveys and everything looks as expected. For survey 4796 sessions, they look being triggered as scheduled based on the set criteria and some sessions even have submitted responses. What did you exactly mean by the survey doesn’t work when using criteria?
When I use the criteria the survey doesn’t upload/send. When I remove the criteria I can answer the survey. Therefore, I have certain responses. I changed the survey several times to review the criteria.
Hi Ymke, You did not mark your survey 5016, question_id 2 as persisted, only persisted questions could be used across survey for criteria evaluation purposes. Please look at the info here for more details.
Also please look at this tutorial to learn how to setup a survey flow with criteria to implement skip patterns.