Questionnaire Programming

This topic relates to the process of developing a CAPI version of a questionnaire. We strongly recommend that you develop the content for your questionnaire according to the Questionnaire Design topic. When you have a paper based survey then you should follow the steps in this article.

The main challenge when digitizing large household surveys common in the field of impact evaluation is to keep an overview over the content and functionality of a questionnaire when it is written in code that is developed to suit the need of a computer and not a human reader. There are many tools online where surveys can be developed in a click-and-drag fashion. While they do a great job displaying a questionnaire written in code in a human readable form, they only do so while looking at a single question or a small section of a questionnaire. Learning to write and understand questionnaire programming languages is imperative for anyone who wants to code a large and complex high quality CAPI questionnaire.

This topic on Questionnaire Programming links to but does not focus on the syntax of any questionnaire programming language. The focus is on how to plan your work when going from a blank paper to final code, and how to maintain a protocol for high quality throughout that process. This topic also lists a lot of tools that will be helpful along the way.

Read First

You should never start coding your survey before you and your research team has more or less finalized the content of your survey. The reason for this is that even minor content changes might require that you have to re-do something that you have already spent a long time on. Questionnaire design (content development) and questionnaire programming (functionality development) as two strictly separate tasks which requires the research team's full attention separately. Starting with functionality or late major changes to questionnaire content, are sometimes inevitable, but they are by far the most common reason for quality issues in CAPI survey data.

This chapter related to the set up, work flow and organization of questionnaire programming rather than best practices in SurveyCTO coding best practices. The two topics are related, and you will find many links to such articles. If you want to browse SurveyCTO coding best practices then go to the stand alone chapter called SurveyCTO coding practices.

Important articles often forgotten about

• Questionnaire Encryption - read before creating your questionnaire
• Survey Data Quality Checks - read while you are programming your questionnaire. Best practice is to develop data quality checks in parallel to coding your the questionnaire.
• Version control of questionnaires already used in the field - Important best practice when you realize that you need to make changes to a survey you have already started using in the field.

General Guidelines on Questionnaire Programming

The following topics are ordered in a more or less chronological order.

Choosing Software

There are several software on the market for CAPI data collection. The rest of this chapter will provide advice assuming that your project will be using SurveyCTO. Many of the practices are valid in other software too, but SurveyCTO is assumed.

Setting up a Server

You can either set up your own server, but if your project is a DIME project you can use DIME's development server until your project requires its own server.

Create a questionnaire

The easiest way to start with one of SurveyCTO's template forms. You can either program your questionnaire in the form builder or in an Excel sheet. We recommend that your default approach is programming in an Excel sheet. Regardless what method you use to program your questionnaire, and regardless if you start with an empty instrument or use a survey that have been used before, it is important that you encrypt your questionnaires.

How to organize the programming of a questionnaire

Before starting the programming, read this article on form settings first.

The organization of how to approach coding a questionnaire (or perhaps the lack therefore) is in our experience the most common reason for serious bugs that should have been avoidable. questionnaire organization programming will provide you with a general overview, pseudo code is a practical approach how to get started with your code. After you have planned the programming of your questionnaire, but before you start the programming, go through this list of SurveyCTO best practices and make sure that your planning are in-line with all recommended best practices.

Updating a questionnaire already used in the field

While SurveyCTO have fucntionality to allow edits to questionniares already in use, this is not advisable, instead create a new separate version of your questionnaire.