ExpiWell: Personalize EMA and ESM surveys

Personalize Timings and Retaking Missed Surveys for EMA and ESM (Beta)

For some ecological momentary assessment (EMA) and experience sampling method (ESM) projects, it is helpful or even necessary to allow participants to personalize timings or retake missed surveys. To this end, we have built the "personalizer" feature.

Please note that these features are in the beta stage. We encourage researchers to carefully test it out for their projects before launching.

You can do the following three things:
  1. Adjust Schedule: Participants can change the survey timing within the day
  2. Move Schedule: Participants can move the survey to a different day but survey timings within the day are unchanged
  3. Retake Surveys: Participants can retake missed or completed past surveys

Step 1: Schedule and choose surveys you want to personalize


Before enabling "Personalizer", you will need to create your survey schedule. Below, we have created a week long schedule with both a "morning survey" and "evening survey".

Personalizer Tab

In the "personalizer" tab, click on the "+ New" button to create a set of surveys that you want to allow participants to personalize.

Choose Surveys to Personalize

You will then need to follow the steps below to select the specific surveys that you want to allow participants to personalize. This is because you may not want to allow participants the freedom to change the timings for all the surveys.

1. Title: Create a title for the set of surveys you want personalized
2. Pick: Choose the surveys to be personalized as part of this set of surveys
3. Optional "Reschedule Multiple: By default, participants can only change the timing of one survey at a time. However, by toggling this, you can allow participants to reschedule all the surveys at once 
4. Click "Check": Click this when you are done choosing the surveys


Personalizer and Choosing Surveys

Step 2: Decide on what participants can personalize

After you have chosen the set of surveys that can be personalized, you can then decide to apply any or all of these personalization options.

Personalizer Options

Adjust Schedule

This allows participants to change the survey timing within the day. This personalization is valuable when you want to allow participants flexibility due to different routines. For example, some participants wake up at 6am in the morning whereas others may wake up at 10am due to shift work.

You can first decide on the survey time window, or how long the survey window should be open for.

Personalizer Adjust Time Window Toggle

Next, click on the "+" button to create the allowable survey time window for the day as shown below.

Adjust Survey Time Options

Move Schedule

The next option for personalizing is "move" schedule. This enables participants to move the surveys to different days. 

As shown below, the first 5 morning surveys can be moved to any of the days 1-7.

Personalizer Choose Surveys to Move

You can also add additional days for participants to move their surveys too by clicking the "+" button. Then, choose from the dropdown which day to add. You can add additional days by clicking on the "+" button multiple times.

Personalizer Move Surveys

Retake 

The other personalization option is enabling "retake." When participants miss or complete any of their surveys within the set, they are allowed to "retake" the survey. 

Personalizer Retake

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