Upgrading assignments

Survey Solutions assignments play a critical role in the survey process because they regulate who is supposed to deliver the incoming data (interviews). Each assignment is referring to a particular questionnaire.

It is best to not modify the questionnaire during the survey. Some of the undesirable effects of this are:

• the survey becomes split between several databases, each has to be downloaded separately from Survey Slutions and appended later using external tools;
• the data may no longer be comparable (e.g. choice sets differ between questions);
• the data quality may be heterogenious (differing between collected earlier and later periods);
• interviewers may need retraining for the newer version of the questionnaire;
• the process of upgrading the questionnaire needs to be followed by upgrading of assignments, which depends on which interviews have been already conducted and which have not.

Sometimes this is unavoidable, e.g. in case a gross mistake was made during the questionnaire development and further data collection based on unfixed version doesn’t make sense.

Protecting pre-loaded answers

Starting with v18.06 Survey Solutions allows protecting values of trigger questions that have been preloaded from being subsequently modified by the interviewer. The protection applies to reduction, but permits extension. This is commonly needed in the panel surveys, where, for example, the names in the list of household members that are preloaded should not be eliminated by the interviewer, but new household members may be added if needed.

The protection applies to questions that may perform the role of triggers: 

Errors in user-supplied files for preloading

Survey Solutions allows preloading assignments with data, including answers to questions inside rosters and nested rosters.

It is the user’s responsibility to supply valid input files for this process. The user-supplied files will be validated to match the questionnaire template that is being preloaded. Survey Solutions can detect a number of inconsistencies and common problems and will indicate them during preloading. 

Each detected error is having a code listed in the table below. Additional checks may be added in the future. 

Survey Setup Tab: Import, Copy, and Delete Questionnaire Templates, and Create Assignments

The survey setup tab lets you do several things:

Questionnaires

1. Import template. Import questionnaires from the Designer site to the headquarters software.
2. Create assignments: Headquarters provides two ways of creating assignments for a given questionnaire: one at a time, or in a many at a time (batch).
3. Clone questionnaire template: Copy the questionnaire templates previously imported to the server. This feature is only available to the administrator.
4. Delete questionnaire. This feature is only available to the administrator.

Assignments 

1. Archive and reallocate assignments to members of the data collection team. 
2. Monitor assignments. Displays a tabular view of all assignment and enables you to edit the quantity of interviews for any assignment. 

Maps

Creating Assignments One at Time

Step 1

Log in to your server using the headquarters username and password

Note that each institution using Survey Solutions will utilize their own server. Consequently, your username can differ from the one depicted above. 
 

Step 2

Select the Survey Setup tab, and click on Questionnaires.

Step 3

Create the new assignment for your questionnaire.
 
Click on the questionnaire template you want to create a new assignment for, and then click on New Assignments  from the pop-up menu. 

Numbering in subordinate rosters during preloading

It is important to make sure that during preloading of multiple files the subordinate records are correctly identified.

The numbering depends on the kind of trigger used for determining the size of the roster:

1. fixed: the Id variable in the subordinate file should contain the code of the item specified in the Designer.
2. multiple choice: the subordinate file should contain the codes of items as specified during setting up the multiple choice question in the Designer.
3. numeric: the subordinate file should contain the items with sequential ids starting from zero (0);
4. text list: the subordinate file should contain the items with sequential ids starting from one (1). Note that the text list question itself requires indexing of members starting with zero (0).

Uploading Many Assignments at a time

For many surveys, creating assignments one by one will be a tedious and time intensive task. To help speed up your work, Survey Solutions allows you to batch upload many assignments at once using a tab delimited. Follow the steps below to perform a batch upload of assignments:

Step 1

Create a tab-delimited file with the identifying information for your assignments
 
Before performing an interview, data collection teams must know the name (e.g., name and surname of the head of household) and/or location (e.g., region, county, district, neighborhood) of who they should be interviewing. To facilitate locating the respondents, this identifying information will appear on the dashboard of enumerator app for each interview for which they are responsible.