Description: I am trying to figure out how long a participant took to complete a survey sent. Does “Duration (seconds) from first response to completion time” capture this? Because I am getting discrepancy when looking at individual item responses and this duration time. For example, “Duration (seconds) from first response to completion time” value is 2.7 seconds whereas, when looking at individual response times for each item (and subtracting last response time from first response time), I get ~28 seconds?
That “Duration” should be like what you said. Would you please share the session UUID related to this issue? Or you can share the participant ID, the activity ID, and the scheduled time of the session. I’ll dig deeper afterward.
Just to add to this! It seems this is the case for every single session in my survey. The "duration(seconds) from first response to completion time” is much shorter than when I calculate duration based on individual answer response times. Do you think it is maybe capturing section specific data? I’m very unsure
Thanks for the details. I doubt that it’s because of section specific data. But I asked one of my colleagues to check this further. We will try our best to get back to you by Monday. Please let me know if it’s an urgent matter for you.
Thank you for looking into it! I do have to finalize payments for participants so would appreciate a response sooner. However, I do understand you need time to look into it further. For the time being, are you able to tell me whether the way I am calculating duration, based on individual item answer response times, is accurate? Or do you suspect issues in those timestamps as well?
I actually checked one of my own studies, and things seem to be correct.
You can share some screenshots of where you see those values and how you calculate them. The more, the better. But note that anything you share here will be publicly accessible. You can also share privately by contacting us at support@avicennaresearch.com.
Or I can be a researcher in your study and dig deeper. My email address, just in case: mojtaba@avicennaresearch.com.
Thanks! I’ve been calculating them using question response times. Example: “answer_response_time”:“2025-08-12T23:28:24.614000+00:00.” I extract these for every item then subtract the last response time with the first to get the duration. I’ll continue this method until Monday!
Sure. However, I prefer to do those checks for you now At least as much as I can.
It seems you’re checking those values using the downloaded CSV file. Am I right? If that’s the case, can you share the corresponding row for that session, without including sensitive info?
Sure, here it is! 4661_Responses.csv (8.5 KB)
“Duration..seconds..from.first.response.to.completion.time” is what I got from the data export on Avicenna, “duration_s” is what I’ve calculated from individual response times [meta data info on each item]
Thanks. I think I found the problem. Your survey has a randomization on its sections, which affects the order of questions. But, for calculating the Duration, our system seems to still refer to the first question by the order you see the questions in your survey editor, regardless of its response time. Also, the end of that Duration is the session’s Record Time, not the last response time. The date/time values below are in UTC:
Time of response to the first question you see in your editor (which is Q 2): 2025-08-12 23:28:23.815000
Session’s record time: 2025-08-12 23:28:26.566
The difference: 2.751
I’ll ask my colleague to check and fix this. For now, please rely on your own calculations.
Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for reporting.
Thank you so much for your report. We will have a new release within the next two weeks, which will allow you to align the new format with the old one and obtain the correct values. Please note that the old format will soon be deprecated.
We recommend that you try this new feature and share your feedback with us, as it is very valuable. If the new feature does not fully meet your requirements, please feel free to contact us through the support email that my colleague shared with you. Our team is ready to help and hear your suggestions.
At least as much as I can.