Hi,
I am working on a project that is switching over to SurveyCTO. In the meantime, we have a few thousand paper surveys that need to be digitized. I'm curious if anyone has experience using ODK/SurveyCTO to conduct hard copy data entry. I'd like to get specifics such as average entry times for numeric/text fields.
I'd also like to know if anyone encountered/solved complications when hard copy surveys have invalid responses. If the entrant encounters an invalid response toward the end of the survey, is there a way to save and use the information entered so far, or do you need to scrap the validated form and re-enter the survey fully in a non-validation form?
Thanks in advance for any insights!
Emma
Hi Emma,
Have you considered using our new SurveyCTO web UI for the data-entry, or
were you thinking about using tablets?
We had considered adding a new "Data-entry" appearance style for the web
UI, to optimize for keyboard use (so, e.g., pressing Enter would move to
the next screen rather than entering a linebreak into the current text
field) -- but unfortunately we haven't added that yet. Still, you can tab
to the Next button and press Enter to go to the next page, so data-entry
operators could become very quick.
For validation, you could define your constraints and requirements as
desired, then provide a kind of global "out." At the very end of your
survey, you could have an "Enforce field requirements and validation?"
question that defaults to YES. All of your constraints could have an "OR
${enforce}=0" on the end and, in the "required" column, you could put
"${enforce}" instead of "true". Then, your surveyors could respect your
requirements to the greatest extent possible, use the "skip to next" option
to jump past any requirement that they just can't meet, and then, at the
very end, once they've corrected everything possible, they can switch the
"enforce" question to "no" so that they can finalize and save.
This strategy of having a global "out" for validation or even required
fields is something that should work on any ODK system. In particular, I
don't think that most people realize that the "required" column can have
something dynamic so that whether something is required or not can depend
on another field.
Best,
Chris
ยทยทยท
---
Christopher Robert
Dobility, Inc. (SurveyCTO)
http://www.surveycto.com/
http://blog.surveycto.com/
On Fri, Jan 8, 2016 at 1:31 PM esmith4@wellesley.edu wrote:
Hi,
I am working on a project that is switching over to SurveyCTO. In the
meantime, we have a few thousand paper surveys that need to be digitized.
I'm curious if anyone has experience using ODK/SurveyCTO to conduct hard
copy data entry. I'd like to get specifics such as average entry times for
numeric/text fields.
I'd also like to know if anyone encountered/solved complications when hard
copy surveys have invalid responses. If the entrant encounters an invalid
response toward the end of the survey, is there a way to save and use the
information entered so far, or do you need to scrap the validated form and
re-enter the survey fully in a non-validation form?
Thanks in advance for any insights!
Emma
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Hi Chris,
Thanks for this feedback. The information on required responses is particularly helpful. In fact data entry aside, I'll incorporate that into our current survey coding right away.
I hadn't decided yet whether we would use the web UI or tablets. I was leaning toward tablets, but I don't have a great sense of whether the tablet interface would slow entrants down or possibly speed them up. We may just need to do timed tests of each, but if anyone has experience trying this, I'd love to hear any advice.
Thanks again!
Emma