Hi Michael,

As part of my DP web application I have a surveying module.   It handles 
various types of questions:
* Yes No, 
* Strong Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, Strongly Disagree and Not Applicable
* Free form comments

The structure is that there is a questionnaire panel as the master for a 
survey, which include a surveyid, author, title, preamble (ie notes about what 
th survey is for),  whether the responses are anonymous, the start and end 
dates, and in my case the class of recipients.

As a child of that panel there is a questionwording panel, One record per 
question! I use the fields: 
* question number 
* Question part, eg you can have Q2a, Q2b, and they are grouped on the survey 
form, 
* and then the scaling being used for that question. eg Y/N, Lickert scale, 
Free Form, 
*or as a header, eg no question, for example:

Q2. The following questions relate to your experience with blah blah, please 
answer each part  (Header)
Q2a etc  (question parts)
Q2b etc

You can add any number of questions you like, but my experience is you should 
keep survey's small and tight otherwise you tend to piss people off.

In my particular case, the user is sent an email, with a link to the 
questionnaire, 
eg http:www.myserver.com/mysurvey.cgi?surveyid=AD54FG72&userid=bjh, (or no 
userid if anonymous) and the survey is generated from the database

Mine is only a single page survey, the user completes the survey and submits 
the data back to the database. On the response side their are two panels. The 
Response panel (one record for each survey submitted) This panel has fields for 
*the surveyid, 
*a responseid, 
*the date and time received, 
*the userid, and the 
*IP address.  

This has a child panel which are the Response Instances for each question ie 
one record for each question on the survey. In this panel the fields are 
* ResponseID (which ties it to the parent response panel) 
* The Question Number and 
* Question Part,
* The users response as the code for the response, or in a memo field for free 
form text

The author of the survey can request reports from that surveyid. Lickert scale 
and yes/No sum the totals for each response, and freeform list the responses.

Do not be tempted to place the questions nor the responses onto one panel. It 
might be easier coding to start with, but you will suffer in the long run.

I hope this helps

Bye
Brian





  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Michael Iannantuoni 
  To: Dataperfect Mailing List 
  Sent: Monday, November 27, 2006 8:35 PM
  Subject: [Dataperf] Questionaire/Survey with DataPerfect


  Background:
  Our village has recently taken part in a  questionnaire/survey whereby 
everyone filled in a paper form which is now being transferred to computer 
file. The software provided by our local authority (Council) is not 
particularly good: you have to go on line for it to build a "Project List" of 
surveys done for other villages before selecting & downloading the one for us - 
it does this every time you want to transfer data from paper to file. The 
"Questionnaire" part then loads but is not very user friendly, not allowing you 
to go back to previous questions without loosing data back to that point . . . 
. I could go on. Once data has been transferred to files for the session, it 
must be uploaded but the process of building a Project List etc.. occurs again 
first - all extremely slow & frustrating.

  In a moment of frustration/weakness, I did say to the chap running the 
project for the village (he did have a good head of hair before it all 
started!) that it would be fairly straight forward to design a database that 
would do all that is required so much easier. Luckily for me, I'm too late this 
time as the project is well under way but may be repeated in a couple of years 
time.

  So my question is has anyone designed a DataPerfect database for 
questionnaires/surveys? It seems to me that that it should be fairly straight 
forward but maybe laborious. There questions fall into four categories:
      Simple Yes/No responses,
      Multiple choice options whereby only one of a number of options must be 
chosen,
      Multiple choice options whereby none, one, some or all of a number of 
options must be chosen.
      A box allowing comments to be written.

  The first and last are easy, I'm not sure of the best way to achieve the 
other two.

  The other problem is the size of the questionnaire. There are just under 200 
questions which would be too many for a single panel, although they are divided 
into sections such as Transport, Environment etc... I had a thought of using a 
panel for each section with a master Table of Contents Panel with links to all 
other panels a bit like an table of contents linking to the relevant pages of a 
book and maybe links from each panel to previous & next panels.

  This is all thankfully a way off yet but any thoughts or ideas would be 
welcomed.

  Michael




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