Two newbie questions: integrating questions sets and adding a PDF for informed consent

Support
1

Hello All -

I am very new to ODK and setting up a basic survey. I’ve run into to minor issues I can’t find solutions for:

  1. I have 25 questions divided among 5 groups. I have integrated Groups for each of these. Right now the online web-based version is simply a single continuous list with all five groups. I would much prefer the groups have their own pages or be otherwise separated out. Is there a way to do this?
  2. We also have a longer pdf (5 pages) about the study and data protections that I would like to link or otherwise include. Is there a way to accomplish this simply? We have no access internally to a public cloud drive (eg googledrive or one drive) where I could reference a hyperlink. So looking for some kind of workaround.

Thanks for any tips in advance

Vincent

2

Hello @VincentJ, welcome to the ODK Community!

For your first question, I believe the setting you are looking for is pages, at least in enkento. You find some help looking into the appearance documentation.

For (2), you have several options, depending on your needs.

  • If you simply want the information available, and if your PDF is just text (e.g. informed consent), you could put it all in one or more note fields. The note fields allow you to write markdown, so you could format it similar to HTML, with titles, bold, font colors, etc.
  • If you want to just include a link for “more information”, you can embed a link directly in a note field to the PDF hosted on someplace like GitHub. If you have no internet access whatsoever, then this obviously wouldn’t work.
  • If the PDF is supposed to work as some sort of informed consent, you could embed the text and use a signature widget to capture their signature. Not all IRBs like that though, if you need IRB approval. More discussion on informed consent is here.

Finally, another option you might consider: If you are doing some sort of study that requires informed consent, I often find it easier to print out the informed consent sheets, attach a unique barcode to each one, and have ODK read the barcode to link the participant to the consent form. This is cumbersome, but it separates the identifiable portion (informed consent) from the de-identified portion (whatever your survey is), which may be valuable to you.

Best of luck!

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