Hey!
In study 1413 the first participants finished.
However, for many of them the last day of their surveys is not being updated (NA’s).
This is the case for:
37792
37787
37728
37726
I doubt that this is due to a lacking internet connection. What is the problem here?
Kind regards,
Abdallah
Your above question is confusing. The study setting says the participation should continue indefinitely. I assume in your deployment, the plan was not to continue indefinitely, and wanted it to finish after certain number of weeks. But clearly, Ethica does not know that and that’s the issue here. Please check the Participation Period article for more details.
Dear @m.hashemian ,
What I mean is that for some participants their last day of assessments is not being uploaded. See screenshot below. Only NA’s even though they completed it on the fourth of May.
What is the reason for this?
Furthermore, I set the participation period to “from start to end” (not indefinite as far as I see) since the period is different depending on the participants condition (depending on whether activity 10828 or 11908 is triggered). So participants complete their last assessment either after 36 or 50 days.
I see. The only reason this can happen is the following:
The participant responds to the last survey, but while responding either she is offline or does not have a reliable Internet connection, so the Ethica app cannot upload the response. As the study finishes, the participant does not open the app anymore, so the response remains on their phone and never get uploaded.
In order for the data to be uploaded, these participants need to open the app and press Sync Data (under Settings), so all responses are being uploaded.
Hope it helps
Dear @m.hashemian ,
Two of the said participants already deleted their app. Is the data now lost?
In any case they might not be willing to redownload the app because they already finished the study two weeks ago and are quite annoyed by the constant errors at this point. Is there an easy way to retrieve the data?
Kind regards,
Abdallah
Unfortunately not. This is the same in any app. If the user does not sync her data to the cloud and uninstalls the app, the data is lost and there is no way to retrieve it.
We have recently improved our data upload process, clearly showing a message after the survey is finished, asking participants to keep the app open while the responses are being uploaded, but incidents like this show we need to do more to improve the user experience.
Mohammad
Dear @m.hashemian ,
it seems that even if we have participants sync their data on the last day before they delete their app the data still isn’t updated. We had the same problem with 15 participants this week. Here is a description by participant 38212:
“On the last day of the study, as the instructions suggested, I clicked on sync data in Ethica and got a message that all data has already been synced. I thought this meant that everything was already uploaded and, as the instructions said, that I could delete the app.”
What is the problem here?
Kind regards,
Abdallah
That’s actually a good example of how things that participants say and mean is different than what you as a researcher expect.
Below you can see the audit log for this participant (you have access to this in the researcher dashboard as well):
You can see the participant did a data sync on 17th and then logged out of the app. That’s why the surveys on 18th and 20th were neither presented nor responded.
Hope it helps
