Resetting respondents to an earlier survey page

There are a few common reasons why it may be necessary to manipulate which page a survey respondent is on:

• A quota or terminate has changed, and respondents screened out need to be reinvited to take the survey.
• Any other kind of change which could affect respondents who have gone inactive later in the survey.

There are a handful of variables included by default in the survey data which are used to track where respondents are in the survey, and what pages they have seen.

To move a respondent to a different page requires manipulating some of these variables:

In the event respondents that need to be reset have already achieved a final status, it will also be necessary to clear responses at the disp and disp_first variables (if the respondent has terminated) or oq variable (if the respondent has hit a quota stop), as well as the status variable.

Step 1: Create an export of target fields

Suppose a researcher wishes to reinvite a subset of respondents to the survey who originally hit a quota stop. In this case, it will be necessary to change the status variable, clear out responses at the oq variable, and modify the values at the page variables noted above. Begin by creating an export containing these fields: status, oq, last_page_id, pages, and pages_hist.

Now, open the export.

Step 2: Modify fields in export

There are a handful of modifications to make to this data:

• status: Respondents with a final status cannot re-enter the survey and change answers, so this value will need to be changed to Inactive (N) or In Progress (P). For this example, we'll use status N.
• oq: This column should be cleared for the given respondent subset since they now qualify.
• last_page_id: Set the value of this column to the page value this group should start on when they re-click the invite link for the survey. This can be the first form, or a form later on, such as the one containing the last question they would have seen.
• pages: Modify this to only include pages that, in the new scenario, the respondent has seen. For the purposes of this example, we'll be resetting respondents to form 15, so all values after 15 should be removed.
• pages_hist: Because this is intended as a record of respondent activity, it is not necessary to remove values from this string. Rather, just add the form respondents are being reset to at the end of the string.

Step 3: Update survey data 

Using the Add Data applet, overwrite these fields in the survey database with the modified export data.