Activities

Activities are the tasks that you require participants to perform during your study, either once or multiple times. This can include responding to a Survey, completing a Cognitive Task, reporting their Time-Use or nutrition diary, or visiting a page containing their personalized intervention. A study Activity, regardless of its type, contains a few core components. They include:

• Triggering Logics: defines when the Activity should be prompted to the participants, and how it should be repeated.
• Notification Templates: defines how and when the participant should be notified (or reminded) about the Activity.
• Criteria: specifies under what conditions the Activity is enabled or disabled for a given participant.
• Expiry Time: specifies how long Ethica should wait for the participant to complete the Activity.

We describe each of these components, and other available attributes, in the following sections.

Accessing Activities

As a researcher, you can use the Activities page of the Researcher Dashboard to view the list of Activities in your study, add a new Activity, edit or delete the current ones, or perform other actions on them. To access this page, click on the Activities link on the left panel:

You can add a new Activity by clicking on the Create New Activity button. This will open the Activity Creator dialog. First, you must select an Activity type from the list.

For example, after selecting Survey, you will be asked to choose whether you want to create a new Survey or import an existing Survey Definition File.

Currently, Ethica only supports importing Surveys via a Survey Definition File. So the import option is only shown if you have chosen a Survey Activity. After finalizing this dialog, you will be taken to the Ethica Activity Editor page where you can program your Activity.

Each Activity that you add to your study is listed on the Activities page within a table where each row includes different details about the Activity. This table shows the following information:

• Name: The friendly name assigned to this Activity by the researcher.
• ID: The ID of the Activity. Each Activity in Ethica is automatically assigned an ID unique across the whole system. This ID is shown here.
• Status: This indicates whether an Activity is already Published, or is in Draft (Only for Survey Activities) mode. More on that here.
• Triggering Logics: When the Activity should be prompted to the participant. More on that here.
• Expiry Time: How long the Activity remains active waiting for the participant's response. You can read more about Expiry Time here.
• Notification Templates: How the participant should be notified or reminded about the Activity. You can read more about Notification Templates here.
• Description: This is a description of your Activity.

Via the three dots at the end of each row, you will also get the option to perform the following actions on a given Activity:

• Edit opens the Activity in the relevant Activity Editor where you can modify it.
• Release prompts the Activity to one or more participants right away.
• Duplicate creates a copy of your selected Activity.
• Move moves the Activity from the current study to another study. You need to have the required permissions on both studies. Also, the Activity shouldn't have any session for any participant.
• Go to Responses (only for Survey Activities) takes you to the Survey Responses page where you can see the responses of the participants to that Survey. Discover additional details on the topic through View Responses
• Delete deletes the Activity from your study. The data currently collected for this Activity will not be removed.

Note that when you make any changes to a given study, such as adding, modifying, or deleting its Activities, moving them, or duplicating them, the change is not immediately received by the participants' devices. You need to update the device for all participants currently enrolled, as described here. Any participant who joins your study after this change will have the latest changes to the Activities.

Activity Editor

Ethica provides a graphical user interface that allows you to create a new Activity or make changes to an existing one. The options you have in this editor depend on the type of your Activity. For example, Survey Activity Editor allows you to add different Survey questions, while the Stroop Editor allows you to configure the cognitive task. The following screenshot shows the Survey Activity Editor:

Each Activity editor in Ethica contains a few sections shown on top of the page. You can switch between different sections by clicking on their name.

The first section, Content, shows you the configurations available for the current Activity. What you see in the Content section will be different depending on the Activity type. You can refer to the article for each Activity type to learn more about the options available for that Activity.

The next, Triggering Logics allows you to define and configure Triggering Logics for your Activity. We explain Triggering Logics in-depth in the Triggering Logics section.

The third section, Notification Templates, allows you to configure the Notification Templates for your Activity. You can learn more about them in the Notification Templates.

The final section of the Activity Editor, Preview & Publish, allows you to preview your Activity based on the settings you entered, and if everything is the same as you expect, publish it to your study.