General Survey Information
Choose the General Information option (if creating a new survey, this is the first page you will see) to provide some basic information about the survey. The fields are explained below:
General Survey Information
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Introductory Text | Optional, up to 10,000 characters in length. Provide a set of text that will be displayed when a participant starts the survey. You may include HTML in this area, but please be sure you know what you are doing. If you would like to add a carriage-return (paragraph break), simply type in “<p>” (without the quotes). When you first create the online survey, the system may automatically insert some basic default text in this area. You may change any of this text as much as you like – the system will not change it back later as long as you save your changes.This is a good place to place any text for informed consent purposes. You may view how this text is displayed to participants by saving it, then going to Preview Introductory Text, which is available from the Section List page. |
| Closing Text | Optional, up to 7,000 characters in length. Provide a set of text that will be displayed after a participant completes the survey and saves their responses. This is an ideal place for debriefing information. You may include HTML in this area, but please be sure you know what you are doing. If you would like to add a carriage-return (paragraph break), simply type in “<p>” (without the quotes).You may view how this text is displayed to participants by saving it, then going to Preview Closing Text, which is available from the Section List page. |
| Display sections in random order? | You may specify a specific ordering for all sections or have the system randomize the order for all sections. You may also specify the order of some sections and a random order for other sections. If you specify the order for only some sections, you may also specify for each section, whether it should be displayed before or after the random-ordered sections. The system does not keep track of the random order sections were displayed for each participant. |
| Mobile Devices Allowed? | If set to Yes, the participants accessing the system using the mobile version (app) on a mobile device like a smartphone or tablet will be allowed to participate.
If the survey makes use of images or question and choice layout is important, it may be better to set this to No as the layout may be rendered differently on devices. Especially on devices like smartphones with small screen sizes. For technical reasons, there is no easy way to preview how questions will look on a mobile device except to login as a test participant using an actual mobile device. |
| Participant response review/change | If set to Yes, then participants may review and change responses just before they complete the online survey. They are given this opportunity after they complete the last section of the survey, before any closing text is shown. At this point, they can see all their responses and go back to any section to change them. Once they complete the online survey, they cannot go back at a later date and change any responses.
It may be useful to set this option to No (so that they are not allowed to review or change their responses at the end of the survey) if sections are somehow dependent on one another. Meaning that allowing participants to change their responses may affect the integrity of data collection. |