Your First Survey
In the previous section, we created our first study, added a few data sources to it, and enrolled there as a participant. Our study so far collects sensor data behind the scenes and uploads it to our researcher dashboard. In this section, we expand our study by adding a few surveys to it.
To start, navigate to the Researcher Dashboard, and from the left panel click on Activities. Activities are the tasks participants are asked to do during their participation, such as surveys, cognitive tasks, or time diaries.
Click on
New Activity
to create your new survey. This will take you to the Activity Editor interface:
Creating your first survey in Ethica using Activity Editor
By default, Ethica adds a button to the home screen of the participant's app, labeled
New Survey Trigger
, and allows them to start the survey by tapping on it. We want to rename this button to Exercise Motivations
. So from the top part of the Activity Editor, open the Triggering Logics
section, and click on the box for the triggering logic there:
Renaming the User Triggering logic
Then modify the first box from
New Survey Trigger
to Exercise Motivations
, and save the changes.Note that as you change your survey, it's being saved automatically on the server. You can also save it by pressing the
Save
button on the top right corner.Switch to the
Content
tab. You will see there is one question already with Question ID 1. Click on Edit button start editing the question. Then change the content of the question to:We wanted to know what motivates you to exercise every day.
We also want to add an image to our question's content. Click on the rightmost icon on the text area toolbar to open the image selector.
Upload the image you want to add to this question. Then click
Select
to choose this image. When done, you can click outside the question box to save it.
Your first question in Activity Editor
Now we want to add a new question to this section. You can choose the question from the right-side panel, labeled
New Item
, and drag and drop it below the current question. Here we want to ask participants to take a picture of what motivates them to exercise, so we will use an Image question with the following content:Please take a picture or upload a photo of what motivates you to exercise
We now should publish our survey to allow our participants to access it. To do so, go to the
Preview & Publish
section and click on the Publish
tab on the left side. Then click on the Publish
button.
Publishing the survey
Let's go back to our dummy participant account and check our new survey there. As we chose Ethica to update participant's devices as well during the publish, when you open the app now, you should see the button for your new survey on the home screen of the app.

Ethica app presents our first survey in the study
If you do not see this button, just close and reopen the app and the button should appear as above.
Click on the
Exercise Motivations
button to open the survey in the app. You will see the first question and the image we added to it. 
Responding to the survey in the Ethica app
Press
Next
to go to the second question. In the second question, we are asked to either upload a photo from our device or take a photo with the camera.
Image questions in the Ethica app
Press
Submit
to finish the survey and upload the responses.Now let's switch back to our Researcher role, and check the response from our participant on the Researcher Dashboard. First, you need to go to the Sessions page. This page allows us to see the activity sessions participants have had so far, or scheduled to have in the future.
On this page, you can filter the data based on participants and activities. You can also select a date range, which can be set to daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly views.

Activity session results showing surveys completed by the participants
You can see above that participant ID 59982 has responded to Survey ID 18400. You can see at what time the survey started and finished.
On this page, you can see all sessions for all participants, whether those that are already past or the ones that are upcoming. For each session, the page shows their status, for example, completed, expired, or canceled.
Now let's view the provided responses. From the left panel, click on Survey Responses. On this page, we also should start by selecting the participants and the activities we want to look at. Select those and press
Display
.
View the responded survey in Ethica researcher dashboard
Note that you can click on each cell of the table to see more information. For example, clicking on the first cell of each row will show more details about that session. Clicking on each cell on the table header shows more details about the question. And clicking on each cell within the table allows you to see more details about that response.
Last modified 3d ago