FAQ

Is the Designer tool online now?

The Survey Solutions Designer tool is a web-based tool and is accessible over the Internet. As with any website, when you can’t use the site, it could be:

a problem with the site,
a problem with connection, or
a problem with your own device.

In order to identify if the problem is with the site or related specifically to you, other devices can be used to try accessing the same site. There are many services of this kind in the Internet, which by probing from multiple IPs can conclude whether the site is up and running, experiencing significant delays, or is working fine.

September 30, 2019

Server Not Working

Occasionally our users receive messages from their interviewers that a certain server “…is not working”. In most cases this is a problem with the user’s equipment used to access the server, rather than the server itself.

The following tools may be helpful in determining whether it is indeed a problem with the server or with a specific user’s device trying to access that server:

These are the third-party tools and we neither produce, nor provide any training or support related to these tools.

September 30, 2019

Which languages can be used in Survey Solutions questionnaires?

This article discusses the appearance (fonts / scripts) of a Survey Solutions questionnaire. You may also be interested in:

changing the interface language of Survey Solutions.
composing multilingual questionnaires.

The questionnaire instrument (questions, options, section names, error and warning messages, etc) can be designed in any language supported in Unicode. Survey Solutions allows text entry in Unicode and the entered values will be preserved in the exported data (UTF-8).

The variable names utilized in the questionnaire must be written strictly using English alphabet (AB..Zab..z), digits and the underscore character. For complete set of rules for variable names see the variable names article.

September 18, 2019

Tablet manufacturers

If you need to get device-specific information or solve a hardware issue, contact your tablet manufacturer for support or consult other users in manufacturer-specific forums. Here are a few community forums lead by the respective manufacturers:

August 23, 2019

Date and Time formats

This document uses the following notation to describe the date and time formats:

Y - year
M - month
D - day
h - hour
m - minute
s - second
T - exactly letter T
{AM|PM} - one of the two time specifications AM or PM.
Mon - month abbreviated to 3 letters
Month - full month name.
DOW - day of week (such as Monday, Tuesday, etc).
TZ - timezone

Exported data

Survey Solutions writes date and time as strings in exported data files. Here is how:

June 27, 2018

How to cite Survey Solutions in a publication?

The suggested citation for Survey Solutions is:

The World Bank, 2018 Survey Solutions CAPI/CAWI platform: Release 5.26. Washington DC, The World Bank

Please, specify the version and year corresponding to the version you were using at the time of the survey.

February 8, 2018

Excessive interviews

Situation

Every interview in Survey Solutions is created based on an assignment, which dictates how many interviews (often just one) must be collected.

In some cases users receive more interviews at the server then the assignment required.

This corresponds to values in the column “Count” are bigger than in the column “Size” in the table showing assignments.

Explanation

The reason for this is the following scenario:

Supervisor gives assignment A to interviewer X;
Interviewer X picks assignment A (synchronizes) and proceeds to the enumeration area;
The supervisor changes her mind and re-assigns assignment A to interviewer Y;
Interviewer Y picks assignment A (synchronizes) and proceeds to the enumeration area;

At this moment both interviewers X and Y have assignment A on their tablet and have the possibility to start an interview from it; note that neither X nor Y know anything about the parallel copy of the assignment, at should normally proceed to fulfill it because it appears on their dashboards.

January 26, 2018

Local Installation: Interviewer App cannot connect to the server over HTTPS

Note:

This issue has been resolved in version 18.12 (23416).

Symptoms:
When Interviewer app is trying to connect to the Headquarters application on a local server over the secure http (https) protocol synchronization process fails with an error “NO CONNECTION TO THE SURVEY SOLUTIONS SUPERVISOR. PLEASE MAKE SURE THAT THE WEBSITE IS AVAILABLE”.

The Headquarters application is setup correctly, with a valid security certificate, and in the mobile browser on the Android device users can successfully access it without any errors or warnings.

January 9, 2018

My questionnaire is not as fast as it used to be. Why?

The Survey Solutions software is being very actively developed and every new release adds new features, optimizations and efficiency improvements. However, sometimes the support team receives inquiries regarding the decrease of performance of the interviewer’s app, perhaps after an update. Here it is important to make sure that a valid comparison is made. A few common explanations to consider:
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Reason	Explanation
1. The questionnaire has changed	This is by far the most common reason. The user tests a version of the questionnaire, then sends it to partners for feedback, then incorporates "the finishing touches": add two checks here, two checks there, two hundred checks over there. By the time all of these changes are made the questionnaire may not even resemble the original version before the pilot. Comparisons are valid provided that the questionnaire is invariant!
2. Different testing scenario.	The amount of checks performed by the device is data dependent. If the tests were done for "a family of two" the responsiveness may be very different when you redo it for "a family of twelve".
3. The tablet could have changed.	The user tests the questionnaire using a tablet specifically purchased for the development team. But for the data collection team, a cheaper model questionnaire is purchased. It is expected the hardware will affect the performance. Test the questionnaire performs responsively on the model that you will be using for data collection!
4. The performance affected by 3rd party apps.	Check if there are any other apps running on the tablet that may affect the performance. Remember that they may update themselves even without your involvement if application auto update is activated. They may compete for resources with Survey Solutions and decrease the performance. Install only what you need. Uninstall everything you don't. Restrict interviewers' accounts to eliminate possibility of installing unwanted apps.
5. Imperfect measurement.	User tested the "speed of the questionnaire" by measuring the total time it takes to enter some values. In the field the time became longer. This can be due to any of the reasons related to the real communication between two people (need to repeat questions, revise earlier answers, think about what is being asked, what are the answers, how to record them into the questionnaire, etc) compared to a rehearsed procedure of entering a specific test example.
6. Comparing apples with oranges.	"The questionnaire used to work faster before! Yes, before it was not in Survey Solutions, and not on an Android tablet, but on a Windows server, and we didn't have any validation checks or calculated expressions, but it was faster". No comment.
7. Wishful thinking.	No objective measurement was taken to measure the performance of the questionnaire during testing, then when the survey started and things start to matter, the questionnaire performance is deemed inadequate. Test during preparation.

Survey Solutions has very flexible and powerful language and multiple strategies for questionnaire implementation. Copying paper questionnaires is usually a common mistake that leads to inefficient questionnaires and inadequate responsiveness. A second opinion of a reviewer helps identify these inefficiencies and get an advice on how to improve the questionnaire.

December 13, 2017

Notes on Compatibility with version 5.21

With version 5.21, we are making a big change by replacing census and sample mode with assignments. Previously when importing a questionnaire, users had to decide between sample mode (with a quantity of 1 interview per case) and census mode (with an unlimited quantity of interviews). With version 5.21, users will simply import the questionnaire and then proceed to making assignments with the imported template. Assignments will give headquarters users more flexibility because they can now specify the quantity of interviews they want when they generate each assignment.

July 5, 2017