In this article
Note: The Survey Router functionality has been deprecated and is no longer available. The content below is for reference only.
Imagine the situation: A respondent or panelist is participating in a survey, but after answering a few questions he/she is screened because the quota for that survey is full for respondents with their profile. This would be irritating for the respondent; they have already invested some time and effort in the survey, logging in and answering the preliminary questions, and (if a panelist) they want to earn their credits. And it is an undesirable situation for you as the survey author; you have a willing respondent available but you cannot make use of them. Well now you can.
Additionally, a survey router could be used in a “global screener” type scenario, often used for river sampling techniques, whereby respondents all begin in a common survey – the “Global screener”. Then based on the answers given to the screening questions, the respondent can be routed to an appropriate survey.
The Survey Router functionality enables you to gather surveys in a group, and if the situation arises where a respondent cannot complete the survey he/she is initially allocated to (due to screening or quotas), then the respondent can be moved seamlessly onto another survey in the group.
Any number of router groups can be created within a company, and each group can include up to 100 surveys (this value is configurable for On-Premise license holders). However a survey can only be linked to one router group at a time.
A number of points must be noted:
- Only surveys using the Optimized database format can be registered in a survey router.
- Survey routing is only available for Web channel surveys; survey routing is not applicable in CAPI and CATI interviewing channels. If the survey does not have the Web channel active, and is registered with a router, the survey launch will fail.
When router configuration is changed (new question(s) are added), affected surveys are moved to a state "Activation pending", so re-launch of ALL surveys will be required.
- TEST databases are not supported for routing between surveys.
For true "seamless" re-routing, where the respondent does not notice he has been transferred to a different survey unless he is told, you will need to ensure that the original and target surveys use the same layout. In most cases it would probably be ethically correct to inform the respondent that he/she is being re-routed anyway, but maintaining the "look and feel" across the surveys would reduce the transferal experience to virtually nothing.
Each respondent must have a unique identifier. This is used to keep track of the respondent and select appropriate surveys. The identifier might be typed in interactively by the respondent, or it could for example be the PanelistID which can be hidden information taken automatically from the panelist's profile. The identifier must be stored in the username column in the respondent table of the source survey.
When a survey is allocated to a "Routing group", the survey author can incorporate a workflow whereby a check can be performed, for example if a respondent is screened from the survey, to see if he/she can be re-routed. The router checks to ensure the "target" survey is available (not closed) and that quotas specified corresponding to the respondent's profile are not already full, before transferring them over. Any information that the respondent has already supplied before being re-routed, that can be used in the new survey, can be copied across to the new survey so the respondent doesn't have to "start afresh".
Once a respondent has been re-routed from the original survey to the target survey, he/she cannot return to the original survey. If the target survey allows the use of the Back button, it will only function back to the point at which the respondent entered the target survey; thereafter the button will be inactive. Any answers provided by the respondent before he/she is re-routed cannot therefore be changed after re-routing (by the respondent going back to the original survey).
If the respondent was initially invited to the survey via an email invitation and was then routed to a different survey, any subsequent clicking on the initial link will direct the respondent automatically to the routed-to survey.
It is possible to route a respondent more than once (daisy chaining of surveys), for example he/she starts in survey A, is routed to B, then routed to C etc. However if this is used and the respondent initially accessed the survey via a URL (email invitation), then the automatic redirection to the latest routed-to survey will only be valid for up to five surveys in a routing chain (this value is configurable for On-Premise license holders).
If a survey is linked to a router group, then a link to that group is available towards the bottom of the Survey Overview page - .
Figure 1 - Example of a Survey Router link on a survey's Overview page
Click this link to go to the Group Details page for the group (go to Group Details for more information).