Web interviews in sample mode

In Survey Solutions v5.20 we have expanded the web interviewing capabilities to cover the sample mode in addition to the census mode. The process consists of two steps:

1. Interviews creation;
2. Links pickup.

The first step is usual assignments creation in the batch mode or manually one after another. Note that as usual, you can assign directly to interviewers by specifying their account name in the “_responsible” column, then the assignment will bypass the supervisor.

The second step is to obtain the list of the generated access links to individual interviews. This is done on the web interview setup screen. Click the blue <download> button to download the list of the assignments in the “interviewer assigned” status. The downloaded file is a tab-delimited data file which contains the following information:

• Identifying questions;
• Generated interview id and key;
• Link to be sent to the respondent.

Note that Survey Solutions does not automatically send the links for interviews to the respondents, and the links must be delivered to them using your own mailer.

Update of the interface in the Headquarters

The interviews list is now presented in an updated table with collapsible columns corresponding to identifying questions:

To open interview details, the user must now click on the interview key.

In the list of the interviewer accounts, interviewers using outdated version of the software are marked in red color.

Troubleshooting page

We have added an HQ troubleshooting page to assist with most common troubles that some HQ users encounter:

Other changes

• The system-generated column ssSys_IRnd is ignored during the preloading. This allows uploading exactly same file to Survey Solutions that was downloaded from it without the need to clean up the file.
• The term “identifying” questions is now applied in Survey Solutions everywhere where “prefilled” was used earlier. The nature of the prefilled questions was always to identify the assignments (households, individuals, enterprises, etc), but was often confused by our users with “preloaded”. To avoid this confusion we now apply the term “identifying” to denote the scope of the questions visible on the dashboards.