Different Questionnaires

The toolbox comes with different ready-made questionnaires, such as the

• default questionnaire_web_survey() for self-administered online surveys,
• questionnaire_interviewer_administered() for interviews conducted by an interviewer, or
• questionnaire_demo() for a version of the app that includes explanations for how the app works behind the scenes.

If you need more flexibility, you can also modify existing questionnaires or create your own ones from scratch. To do this refer to the more detailed explanations available in vignette("app-questionnaire").

Settings

There are multiple settings available to the app to change how it behaves, where data is saved and much more. These settings need to be passed to the app under the parameter app_settings and are created using create_app_settings(). You can read about all options in the function’s helpfile ?create_app_settings(). If you’re specifically looking to save data into a database, you can find a detailed explanation in vignette("app-database").

library(occupationMeasurement)

app(
  # Use the questionnaire for interviewer-administered interviews
  questionnaire = questionnaire_interviewer_administered(),
  app_settings = create_app_settings(
    # ... specify your custom settings here:

    # Collect an interview_id, so that you can merge data from your questionnaire
    # and from the app after data collection
    require_respondent_id = TRUE,

    # Skip follow-up questions related to ISCO skill level
    # or ISCO supervisory/managment occupations
    # (in case similar questions are already included in your questionnaire)
    skip_followup_types = c("anforderungsniveau", "aufsicht")

    # ...
  )
)

Some settings can also be varied between individual sessions / interviews, e.g., if they were to depend on a previous question or input from an external questionnaire. To modify these “session”-settings you pass them as query parameters:

# Ask questions in past tense
https://{url-to-my-interactive-app}/?tense=past

# Use full range of supported session parameters
https://{url-to-my-interactive-app}/?respondent_id=<your_unique_id>&tense=past&extra_instructions=off&num_suggestions=10

Here is a list of all supported query parameters:

• respondent_id: Identify users (see the section below for more details)
• tense: We may not always want to ask for the current job (e.g. if someone is retired). You can switch between asking for a current or prior job, by switching this between present and past.
• extra_instructions: Is conversational interviewing turned on? Then some additional instructions for the interviwer will be shown. Can be on or off.
• num_suggestions: How many suggestions (maximally) to show to participants. Can be any full number / integer. A common default is 5.

Most of these settings are also described in the help page ?create_app_settings, as their defaults are set in the app_settings.

Identifying Users

If you want to match your data with an external source or embed the interactive app within another survey, you will probably want to pass a unique interview or user identifier, called the respondent_id.

This can be done adding a query parameter named respondent_id to the URL, i.e., https://{url-to-my-interactive-app}/?respondent_id=<your_unique_id> (with {url-to-my-interactive-app} corresponding to the URL your application is running at and corresponding to the unique id).

If you want to make sure that a respondent_id is always supplied, you can enforce this by setting require_respondent_id = TRUE in the app_settings.

Tables

The five different kinds of data, i.e. “tables”, that are being saved right now are outlined below.