For a new interviewer, the first step in RDC is to put the survey(s) onto your RDC device (also referred to as “pulling down the survey”). This needs to be done before the very first interview AND whenever a new survey is published that you need to administer offline. Every offline data collector user must put the survey on device.
When you pull down the survey, you are also pulling down the associated Participant List, i.e. the individuals you’ve created through Uploading IDs onto the Participant List. Therefore before following the steps below, ensure you have added participants to your list.
- Open the desktop client and login
- If the User type is not Remote Data Collector and the user has more Roles within the DatStat Illume Survey Manager, the Remote Data Collection Tab must be selected. Users of Remote Data Collector type with no other roles will only see the Remote Data Collection tab.
- Click the Add Survey button
- If the User is of type Remote Data Collector, the surveys assigned to the User will automatically download and appear in the Survey List. If the User is of type “Normal”, the Get Survey for Remote Data Collection window will open
- Select a Survey or multiple Surveys by holding the CTRL key and selecting multiple surveys at one time
- Click the Next > button and the survey or surveys will be retrieved.
- If the survey you are putting on the device has a known list of potential respondents associated to it (i.e. a “Participant List” containing IDs), the following dialog appears explaining that if your survey has more than one list associated to it, you need to pick the list that you want to go out into the field with. It also states that if you have only one list associated to the survey, it will be selected automatically. You can click “do not show this dialog again”
- Click Ok. NOTE: If the survey is authenticated, i.e. one or more questions exist in the Login collection of the survey, and no participant lists are associated with the survey or the survey is not associated to a Discovery survey Study Task, the User CANNOT proceed past this step and will not be able to download the survey for remote data collection.
- Click the Finish button to complete the process and add the survey and any selected participant lists to your Remote Data Collection tab.
- Note that multiple users can download a survey for remote data collection at the same time, allowing you to have multiple interviewers in the field collecting data for the same survey.
- Once the survey has been successfully retrieved, it will appear in green under Surveys. Green indicates that the survey(s) has collected no data, or has collected data but all of the data has been synced. No unsynced data sessions are associated to the survey.
- If you click on the name of the Survey, on the right pane it will show you information about that survey, such as its current version in remote data collection, the number of complete survey sessions collected but not synchronized with the Illume server, and the number of sessions in progress (sessions that have been started but not submitted).
- The status definitions are as follows:
- Not started: Authentication has not occurred, i.e. login or Start button has not been clicked
- In Progress: Have collected partial data, but those data have not been synced with the server
- Partial: Have collected partial data, and those partial data have been synced to the server
- Submitted: The submit button has been hit but the full submission has not been synchronized
- Collected: # of submissions