After reminding some of my participants to fill in their surveys, they told me that they no longer received any notifications after some period. I read in other threads that this might have to do with the type of phone they are using, but this does not make sense to me because they did receive notifications from the start of the study but then all of a sudden they did not.
I also read something about editing the JSON of the notification that might solve the issue, but here the same logic applies as to the type of phone the participants are using.
For now, it concerns the following participants:
65172
66826
67252
Note that when the participants open the Ethica app they do see a survey waiting for them.
Could someone help me resolve this issue by looking at these particular participants. For now I already asked the participants to restart their phone because they had “blocked” surveys. I was told this happened because of an earlier survey that was still open, but I do not know how participants can prevent his.
I also reloaded the surveys on Ethica to see whether this might resolve the issue.
I hope that you’re doing great.
Looks like you have a problem with the notifications in your study. Can you please tell me how you set the notification templates for your study?
Thank you for your response. Correct, I am having problems with the notifications. Where can I tell how the notifications are setup? I am not the lead researcher of this project and did not set it up during the start. The lead researcher is currently on holiday and it is my responsibility for the time being.
Well, to check the notifications in your study, you need to navigate to the Researcher Dashboard → Notifications Page.
You will find two tabs there:
Notifications where you can see the list of all notifications Ethica has sent to your study participant, and the list of notifications that are scheduled to be sent in the future, based on your Notification Template configurations. Based on your participants’ ID, you can check whether the notifications have been successful or not.
Notification Templates where you can see all the notification templates created in your study.
If there’s anything else that I can help you out with, don’t hesitate to contact us.
As @aso.psg.19 explained in the other question you asked (here), the problem is that the surveys are designed such that sessions may overlap (e.g. one session is prompted at 2 pm, and has a 6-hour window, while the next session is scheduled for 5 pm!). That’s why participants’ session are marked as Blocked.
To fix this, you need to correct the survey triggering logics. This can be tricky considering your study already has active participants. So I would approach this cautiously.
Thank you clarifying again. I understand that these survey sessions can overlap and that this results in a ‘blocked’ survey, but how do I go about preventing this from happening? There are some participants telling me that they still do not receive any notifications. How can they, or I, ‘unblock’ the survey so that they receive notifications again?
@Aso, I appended the notification templates from the study (see below). I hope this can give you some insight. I also saw in the Notifications page that some survey notifications ‘failed’.
I understand that these survey sessions can overlap and that this results in a ‘blocked’ survey, but how do I go about preventing this from happening?
You need to do the following:
Change the survey’s triggering logic such that it will not lead to overlap. You need to make sure a given survey session when prompted, it expires before the next one is prompted. In other words, set the expiry time less than the gap between consecutive sessions. (you can learn more about all these in Ethica Learn).
Then publish your surveys.
All participants’ devices are reloaded right away with your changes. Unfortunately Ethica is not very great in mid-study changes (we are working on it). So you need to make sure your changes are correct otherwise you can cause more trouble.
Also, notifications are not a problem here. The overlapping surveys (blocked ones) are the issue.
Thank you for responding. I will discuss when the lead researcher has returned from holidays. The last thing I wanted to know what kinf of trouble might we encounter when we make changes like these?
Well, not that there will be a problem on the software side. The problem is that because the study is in progress, you cannot properly test your changes. And if you make a mistake in changes you try to make, before you get a chance to find out and fix it, you can cause days of data loss. That’s why I said the risks are high.
