Hi all, I’m hoping one of you will be able to help me as I’ve tried my best to resolve it but I am not having much luck. I currently have 2 projects open with 4 surveys in each designed to trigger at different times depending on what time preference a participant has selected. How do I get the surveys to release at the appropriate times a person selected. For example, how does the person who states they want surveys to be released from 6am get the ‘6am survey’ rather than the 8am? I’ve tried to do this using the ‘criteria’ portion of the triggering logic however, it appears to have not worked. Any and all help would be massively appreciated as this is having a huge delay for my university project. Thank you very much, Alex
First, I wanted to ask for some clarifications. When you say you have 2 studies each with 4 surveys, is it because you want to have multiple “Triggering Times”? Or these are 8 unique surveys? How many of these surveys are unique surveys?
For setting up a survey to be triggered based on a time chosen by the participant, you don’t have to create multiple surveys. But you have to create one survey with multiple “Triggering Logic”, where each Triggering Logic represents one option given to the participant. Then you have to ask the participant in another survey, when they want to receive the prompts.
So assume your study has Survey #1000, and you want it to be prompted every day either at 8 am, or at 10 am, depending on the participant’s choice. So first you create another survey, let’s say Survey #1001, with a question, with question ID 10, as follow:
10. When do you prefer to respond to the survey?
1. Every day at 8 am
2. Every day at 10 am.
You have to create a triggering logic for Survey #1001, such that it’s answered before any prompt from Survey #1001. One good option is to set Survey #1001 to be prompted as soon as the participant joins the study, as they should choose when they want to respond to the surveys during the enrollment.
Now, in Survey #1000, you create two triggering logics, one for triggering the survey at 8 am (let’s call this TL1), and other one for 10 am (let’s call this TL2). Then you set a criteria for each of these triggering logics as follow:
- For TL1:
Q1001_10 == 1 - For TL2:
Q1001_10 == 2
The criterion Q1001_10 refers to the Question ID 10 of Survey ID 1001, which is the question you want to determine when Survey #1000 should be responded. Also 1 and 2 here refer to the ID of the two choices offered in this question.
So basically they say, TL1 of Survey 1000 should be enabled, if the participant chose Answer #1 of Question ID 10 of Survey #1001 (i.e. “Every day at 8 am”), and TL2 should be enabled, if the participant chose Answer #2 of Question ID 10 of Survey #1001 (i.e. “Every day at 10 am”).
Also, note that you have to mark Question 10 of Survey 1000 as Persisted in the Survey Editor. This asks Ethica to keep the response of that survey always available in the app, so it can be used for criteria evaluation, as I explained above.
I hope this helps with your setup. Let me know if any part of it is unclear.
Hi,
Thank for getting back to me so quickly. It is because I want to release the surveys at 5 points during a day and depending on what time preference they selected they will be released at different times?
So as you have put I have put the ‘Time Preference’ option to be released straight away. Thank you for breaking the criteria down, I believe this is what I have done however there seems to be a mix up when someone has selected 6am, it has released the 8am survey?
This is the time preference survey that I have put as ‘never expires’.
So this is the 6am survey
And this is the 8am
Please let me know if there is anything missing, hopefully it is all in line with what you reccommended.
First, you can combine the surveys 4597, 4598, 4599, and 4600 into 3424, and then add as many Triggering Logics as needed to 3424. I assume they are all identical in the content anyway. That makes managing it a lot simpler.
Second, I think the issue here is due to the timezone. Your account on the server is set Etc/GMT+0 timezone, while you are actually in GMT+1, and that’s why you see the example times the website shows are 1 hour off. The app will schedule these times for each participant based on their phone’s timezone, so it will work as expected.
We will look further into what caused the issue with timezones for your account.
Hi Mohammed,
Thank you for your reply and apologies for the delay in advance. Please could you let me know if you have resolved the timezone issues?
Also, when you say combine the surveys into 3424 (Identified support 6am), I’m alittle confused as to how that would mean if they answered the time preference question, what would that look like criteria wise in the triggering logic?
Is this a necessary step or could I leave it as is and the surveys would still be released at the appropriate times, despite having more of them? I hope that makes sense? I suppose I need the surveys to be released to when the pp’s define, they are the same content you are correct.
Thank you very much,
Alex 
Also, sorry how would I combine them if that is necessary?
Thank you very much,
Alex
Thank you for your reply and apologies for the delay in advance. Please could you let me know if you have resolved the timezone issues?
This seems to be a one-off issue due to the setting of your browser which reported an incorrect timezone to the site. We reverted the timezone to GMT+1 and it should work as expected.
Also, when you say combine the surveys into 3424 (Identified support 6am), I’m alittle confused as to how that would mean if they answered the time preference question, what would that look like criteria wise in the triggering logic?
Well, in that case, your survey will have the criteria for all cases, one for each time: 6am, 7am, 8am, and 9am. Then, on each criterion you set the appropriate condition. For example, for the criterion which specifies the survey to be prompted at 6 am, you set it to be only enabled if the participant chose the relevant option in the “Time Preference” survey, and so on.
Is this a necessary step or could I leave it as is and the surveys would still be released at the appropriate times, despite having more of them?
You certainly can leave it as is. It just makes the analysis slightly harder, as your responses will be spread over multiple surveys, and you would have to combine them before analyzing them.
Also, sorry how would I combine them if that is necessary?
Assuming all survey questions, their order, and skip patterns are identical, and they are only different with respect to their triggering logic, you can delete the ones you don’t need and keep only one. And then define additional triggering logics as I mentioned above, for the one survey that you keep.
Hope it helps
Thanks Mohammed, Alex’s supervisor here (Lucy). I’ve implemented that change, so we now simply have 3 surveys in the project - one that asks the participant’s time preference and what type of participant they are (a person with OCD or their carer) and these responses are persisted. There’s then the survey for the person with OCD that has 16 triggering logics to capture all the options (survey is administered 5 times per day with 4 possible start times).
As two of the time schedules run into one another (those starting at 9am will be on the same schedule as those starting at midday for 4 surveys), I just wanted to check that this logic will be correct:
(Q4604_3==1 OR Q4604_3==5) AND Q4604_4==1
So they either need to have selected that they get up at 6am (Q4604_3==1) or that they get up at 9am (Q4604_3==5) and they also have to have selected that they’re the correct participant type. I’m just checking that the brackets are correct here. I’ve used this logic in the surveys released at 12pm, 3pm, 6pm and 9pm where the schedules overlap.
The second question I have is how can we delete projects? Now we have everything we need in a single project, we have many projects that we no longer need and it will minimise the risk of error if we can delete them. I’ve deleted all the surveys from each of them so they are all blank. Can we get rid of them from the left hand menu altogether?
Thanks for you help,
Lucy on behalf of Alex
Hi Lucy,
This is correct . Basically what this criteria:
(Q4604_3==1 OR Q4604_3==5) AND Q4604_4==1
Says is:
If the person identified herself as “individual with OCD” and here preference was either “Around 6am” or “Around 9am”, activate “12 pm”, “3 pm”, “6 pm”, and “9 pm”.
Assuming you have used the above criteria for the relevant Triggering Logics of the survey.
The second question I have is how can we delete projects?
At the moment we do not offer the option to delete the study through the Researcher Dashboard. You can email support@ethicadata.com with the ID of the studies you want to be deleted and they will delete them. Note that the email you use to contact support should have permission on the study IDs being requested.
Hope it helps,
Mohammad