Create 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 Survey Editor interface:

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 Survey Editor, open the Triggering Logics section, and click on the box for the triggering logic there:

Then modify the first box from New Survey Trigger to Exercise Motivations. Then click anywhere outside of the box to 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 the question to start editing it. 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 right-most 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:

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 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:

Respond to Survey As Participant

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:

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. 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:

Press Submit to finish the survey and upload the responses.

View Participant Responses

Now let's switch back to our Researcher role, and check the response from our participant on the Researcher Dashboard. First, from the first panel click on the Activity Sessions. 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 filter the data based on participants and activities, but here we simply check All Participants and All Activities. We also should select a date range, a maximum of 45 days. The date range can be either absolute dates, or relative to the participant's participation period. Here we choose from day 1 to 45, and click Go:

You can see above that participant ID 34016 responded to Survey ID 7950 and completed it. The survey was started on Nov. 19, 2020, at 6:06 am and finished at 6:09 am on the same date.

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:

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.