Preloading data to a new survey

Survey Management
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I am brand new to Survey Solutions. I am trying to preload data for a survey of schools (primary observation unit) that will contain information about our sample, but I’m unclear on how to do this efficiently.

There are currently many fields/variables which could be considered identifying (e.g. province, district, school name, school code, school address, school sector, school session, principal name, principal email address, principal contact number x 3). I have a few questions related to this:

  1. How do I decide which of these to include as identifying variables on the cover page? Should it be as few as possible to uniquely identify the school (i.e. province, district and school name or code), with the rest of the variables as non-identifying and off the cover page, or should all of them be identifying? Ideally, I would like a scenario where the unique school can be selected and the rest of the information listed after that variable is just visible (but not editable) to the enumerator, without all of it being part of the identifying information on the assignment (looks very messy and is hard to read).

  2. In the video tutorial for assignments, the user can select a city using a radio button, then select a district (presumably filtered by city using cascading combobox) from a dropdown. I have a sample of 900 schools that I am preloading to the survey. If I include all the variables listed (except email address, as that is not in the preloaded data), I end up with 900 assignments, but no efficient way of allocating them (i.e. filtering them, as we see in the assignments tutorial), except manually, which will be very time consuming. In addition, some of these are replacement schools and so should only be assigned in particular cases. How can I add filterable fields like this (province, district, etc.) to my survey so that assignments can be easier? What did the example in this tutorial use?

  3. What do I do if I want an enumerator to approach a new case that is not in the preloaded data. Is there an option to fill in a from from scratch?

I greatly appreciate any help you can offer. Thank you.

1 Like
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Did you find a solution? I’m having a similar problem as much of the documentation seems to refer to an older system where “identifying” could be used throughout the survey. I have also seen references to “pull data” similar to the ODK setup, but I can’t get files to upload on the questionnaire to test this out.

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I’m encountering a similar issue where I need to extract data from a previous survey. Is there anyone who can assist me with this? We conducted a baseline survey, and I’m interested in retrieving information such as names, numbers, and addresses from it for the purpose of conducting a second-round survey.