Starting day (same day of the week or absolute?)

Hi,

I am wondering what the options are for the starting day of a study (that lasts 14 days for each participant). Ideally, I would like to set up a study in which participants could register via the same registration number throughout a couple of weeks, but that the starting day would always be a Sunday. Is this possible?

If I understand Ethica correctly, the alternative would be to set up multiple similar Ethica studies with different starting days, and participants would have to register via different registration numbers (depending on which day they would like to start). In this case, I would like to make use of a fixed/absolute starting day (to make sure they always start on the same day, but can sign up in the days before). I have read that it is possible to do this via JSON. I tried this, but it did not yet work. Can you tell me what I am doing wrong?

{“version”:3,“name”:“Study”,“desc”:"",“expiry_duration_ms”:14400000,“triggering_logics”:[{“id”:0,“type”:“time”,“schedule”:{“time_format”:“absolute”,“base”:“registration_date”,“period”:{“start”:“2020-13-05 12:45:00”,“end”:“2020-13-05 12:45:00”,“randomization”:{“function”:“uniform”}},“repeat”:{“occurrence_unit”:“day”,“occur_every”:1},“end”:{“criteria”:“on_count”,“last_count”:13}},“criteria”: etc.

Thank you in advance for your help!

Lotte

Hi Lotte,

Unfortunately it’s not possible to allow people to join on any day and then set their participation start date on the following Sunday. The only way to achieve this is using multiple studies, one for each week, but that will make study management very complicated and I strongly advice against it.

That being said, I don’t think if this is necessary either. If you need the start date to be on Sunday for the purpose of survey scheduling, you can simply schedule the surveys such that they start on the following Sunday. This way, participants can join any day from Monday to Sunday, and the first survey their receive will start on Sunday and will continue from there.

If you need the start date to be on Sunday for the purpose of sensor-based data collection, you can start on any day of the week, and then remove the unnecessary data during the post-processing step.

Hope this helps,
Mohammad

Dear Mohammad,

Thank you for your help!

If I understand you correctly it is possible to schedule the surveys in a manner that their starting day will always be the next Sunday? This way, the study could actually start on the next Sunday, since we do not have any sensor-based data, just surveys. How can I make the surveys start on the next Sunday?

Best,
Lotte

All you need to do is to set the survey’s Time-Triggered triggering logic to repeat once a week on Sunday:

Hi Mohammad,
Similar to the question above, I would also like to give participants the opportunity to register for our study (any day of the week) and schedule the surveys such that they will always start on Tuesday. I see how that could work based on your response above.
Additionally, we’re using several criteria to show certain sections of the survey which we’ve now set up to depend on the registration date, e.g.: “_days_since_reg_date == 1 AND _hours_since_reg_date <= 13”.
Is there a way to let this depend on their first day of participation, i.e. that Tuesday?
Hope that my question is clear, looking forward to hearing from you!
Best, Tim

Hi @t.vantimmeren

Unfortunately I cannot think of a way to do so. That’s because the number of days between registration date/time to that Tuesday will be variable, and we cannot set it in a simple conditional expression as above.

Even in a programming language we would do that by a block of code that is a few lines, and was not possible with just an if statement.

Thanks,
Mohammad

Hi Mohammad,

thanks for your response. I understand that this is difficult with a variable number of days since registration. An alternative would be to trigger the survey conditional not on the registration day, but on another event (e.g. the time when the first survey was triggered). Would something like that be possible?

Best,
Tim

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Yes, you can do that. Something like this:

  1. Define Survey A such that it is prompted on the first Tuesday after the registration.
  2. Define Survey B such that it is prompted every day at 9 pm.
  3. Put a condition on Survey B such that it’s only prompted if Survey A is responded.

This way, Survey B is prompted every day at 9 pm after the first Tuesday following the registration.

That’s actually very smart. Thanks for the suggestion :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Mohammad

Ah yes, thanks - that’s indeed exactly what I was thinking of. What is the function that would refer to another survey as criteria, i.e. similar to ‘_days_since_reg_date == 1’, but then ‘days since Survey A was prompted’?

Best,
Tim

We don’t have such a function, but you can achieve it by putting a criteria on a mandatory question.

Say Survey A (ID 1000) has Q1 as a multiple-answer question, with three answers: 1, 2, and 3, and Q1 is mandatory. The criteria to check if Survey A is answered will be:

Q1000_1 == 1 OR Q1000_1 == 2 OR Q1000_1 == 3

And the criteria for Survey A not being answered will be:

NOT(Q1000_1 == 1 OR Q1000_1 == 2 OR Q1000_1 == 3)

Hope it helps,
Mohammad

Ok, I see how using Triggering Logic could work for some cases. But in our situation, we use ‘criteria’ to trigger Sections within a Survey only during the second week of participation and only during the last survey of the day (for example, we use this criterion: _days_since_reg_date > 7 AND _days_since_reg_date <= 14 AND _hours_since_reg_date >= 18 AND _hours_since_reg_date < 23). That’s why it would be useful/necessary to use some function that uses a different event then reg date.
Or do you see how that could be achieved using what you proposed above?

Best,
Tim

To be honest, what I explained above is the only thing I can think of, and it seems to me the same logic can be used on sections and even questions as well.

Keep in mind, the same criteria features are available for any Ethica component: Survey, Triggering Logic, Section, Question, and Notifications. So what I explained above about triggering logics can be applied to the Sections as well. Although you need to think about how to design this part a bit more in details.

Thanks,
Mohammad

Dear Mohammad,

thank you, I wasn’t aware these same criteria features could be used also in questions/surveys. But that’s great, I will see if I can make it work :slight_smile:

Best,
Tim

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