The Situation
You are running a study with one survey and one other activity:
- Baseline Survey (collected once at the beginning)
- Daily Diary Questionnaire (collected every evening)
You want participants to complete the baseline survey first. Only then should they start receiving the daily diary prompts.
Without extra configuration, both surveys could be prompted independently, which means participants may bypass the baseline survey.
What to Do?
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Pick a key question from the first survey.
- Open the Baseline Survey in the editor. Let’s say the ID of this activity is 26952.
- Choose a mandatory number question that all participants must answer. You can also choose any other question that can be used in the criteria conditions. Let’s say the ID of this question is 1.
[!note]
Pick a mandatory question that will always be shown to the participants regardless of any flow control or branching logic. This ensures the criteria can be checked reliably. -
Set the Criteria for the second survey.
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Open the Daily Diary Questionnaire in the editor.
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Add this Criteria under its Settings tab:
Q26952_1 OR Q26952_1 == 0This means the Daily Diary Questionnaire will only be available if the participant answered question 1 in the baseline survey. The first condition (which doesn’t have any operator) checks for any non-zero answer, and the second condition makes it complete by allowing 0 as an acceptable response.
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Keep the scheduling of the second survey however you want. But note that only the criteria for sessions scheduled at a time after submitting the Baseline Survey will be re-evaluated.
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Test the setup.
- Join the study as a test participant.
- Do not complete the baseline survey (e.g., let it expire without answering any questions or cancel it). The Daily Diary Questionnaire should not trigger.
- Complete the baseline survey. The Daily Diary Questionnaire should now trigger at the next scheduled time.
Pro Tip
If the follow-up survey is scheduled for multiple days and the baseline survey is completed late, the diary sessions for the passed days will be marked as False Criteria. For example, if the Daily Diary Questionnaire runs for 14 days but a participant completes the baseline survey on day 4, they will receive the diary only for the remaining 10 days.