Automatically filling form with existing participant's data

Question

Hi,

we are designing a study on your platform and paying the participants using Prolific. Given the big amount of items, we are planning to generate many identical studies with different items in them. Participants will then decide if they want to do more of them or just one. At the beginning of each study, there will be a relatively long list of questions about the participant. It would be good to collect this data only for the first study a participant performs. Do you have any idea how this can be implemented. Two possible ideas: 1) having the personal-info page shown only to new participants (e.g., checking if the Prolific-ID has been already stored); 2) automatically fill the personal info page when this data already exists.

Thanks a lot for any help,

Diego

Answer 1

An idea in advance: Maybe it may be a good idea to use a random pool of items for each respondent, instead of separate questionnaires.

For your actual question, I would recommend a multi-level structure, but thie chapter has not yet been translated into English: https://www.soscisurvey.de/help/doku.php/de:create:multilevel

Te rough idea: You have a master questionnaire, and a sub questionnaire. The master would collect the respondent's base data, and the sub questionnaire would cover one item. Then you use multiLevelDown() do go from the master to the sub, and you can always offer a choice whether to continue or to finish responding after each item.

Answer 2

I am not so sure, if I understood the setting correctly. Here's another reading :)

If oyu have quite separate studies and want to ask for the personal data only once (or once a year...), then you need some mechanism to recognize a respondent. If it's already on the list, you can (a) insert the data from the database for contents and using preset(), or (b) you can just store a reference in the data set to match the actual data later.