Participant filled in survey but results are blocked

Goodmorning,

I had an email correspondence with one of our participants to remind her of filling in the surveys. She did not receive any more notifications she told me, but she is in fact able to complete the surveys. Yesterday she did and told me through email, but when I now look in Ethica the results are ‘blocked’.

How can this happen and how might we resolve these issues (i.e., no more notifications and blocked results).

Kind regards,
Stephan Tap

Hello Stephan,

I was wondering if you could explain what you mean by ‘The results are blocked’. Once I know what you mean by that, I’ll be able to help you more effectively.

Best,
Aso

Goodmorning Aso,

The results are ‘blocked’ has been reported to me by one of your colleagues (Farbod):

Blocked: the survey could not be triggered due to another active session for the same survey for this participant.

More information can be found here: View Responses - Learn Ethica.

I still want to know how this keeps happening and, more importantly, how I can prevent it from happening because if this issue is not resolved quickly I will be missing a lot of crucial data. Thank you for looking into this.

Best,
Stephan Tap

Hello Stephan,

Good Afternoon. Let me start by telling you how this happens.

Imagine that Survey 1 is scheduled to be prompted at 11 PM and expires 55 minutes later. It is also scheduled to be prompted at 11:49 PM. So at 11 PM, a session will be created for Survey 1, and participants will be prompted to respond to it. This session will stay open until answered, or until 11:55 PM.
In the meantime, a new session will be created for Survey 1 at 11:49 PM. Keep in mind that Ethica only allows one open session at a time. So if Survey 1 is not answered and its session is not closed before 11:49, the next session will immediately close after opening and it will not be prompted to participants. In other words, the 11 PM session blocks the 11:49 PM session.

Having said that, to keep this from happening, you need to make sure that your participants complete a session before moving on to another session.
If you still get the same problem, please let us know.

Best,
Aso