Re: [phpesp-dev] Respondent database

[Matthew G. <gr...@mu...>]

On Sun, Jun 23, 2002 at 10:37:11AM -0400, James E. Flemer wrote:
> [ Please try to make your email wrap at something slightly
> less than 80 characters, thanks. ]
> 
> A few points here. Having the data fields associated with
> each respondent be arbitrarily chosen by the designer is
> difficult. Databases are designed to, and work best when,
> the fields are pre-determined. Adding a new table per
> survey to store this information is a bad idea for several
> reasons. The other option is to somehow store the data in
> one (or two) predefined tables -- this is sort of how the
> survey questions work, its dirty and slow.
> 
> Having a way to add respondents in bulk is certainly a good
> idea. I agree that an option to import them from either
> text (csv or xml) would be helpful.
Yup this would be worthwhile.  I'll add a feature request and work on 
implementing.

> 
> When you are analyzing the data, it should be very easy to
> include the rest of your respondent information. One of the
> great thing about relational databases is that you can join
> tables. Simple use one of the phpESP fields (username,
> email, etc) as a key into your separate database with all
> your custom data.
This is exactly the way to go.  We need to be careful not to "feature
creep" a great survey tool into a lousy statistics package :)

> 
> I am constantly amazed by people wanting to take the data
> out of a database and put it in excel. To me it seems that
> in doing so, you give up so many tools available in SQL. Oh
> well, I suppose it's because excel is pointy-clicky, and to
> take full advantage of a database requires substantial
> knowledge of SQL. 
The answer to this is simple...  People know Excel, it's easy to use and
they aren't will or don't have the time to learning anything else.

> It is certainly well worth learning if
> you need to do any substantial data analysis. There are
> also several tools to help you with this, I know that SAS
> can use an ODBC database directly as a data source.
> 
> (More at a later date on quota management.)
> 
> -James
> 
> On Sat, 22 Jun 2002, Creative Minds wrote:
> 
> > Hi There,
> >
> > I see a lack of functionality in the respondent
> > database. First of all, normally when you conduct a
> > study you would not add respondents one by one but
> > rather want to upload an entire set of respondents. May
> > I recommend using a non-predefined format for this.
> > Respondent information can be very different from
> > survey to survey.
> >
> > I think you should focus on a Comma Separated file for
> > upload with first line containing variable name. After
> > that a guide (as in Excel for instance) where you
> > define what kind of variable is in the field.
> >
> > This would be a good next phase in development before
> > we head on to quota management etc. Because if have a
> > survey where you need 500 males and 500 females, you
> > should be able to create a field inside the survey
> > which then stores values to the respondent database and
> > not just to a datafile. And inside the questionnaire
> > you should be able to check whether you have or do not
> > have enough respondents of a certain quota group and
> > make a condition to end the survey for that respondent
> > with the motivation that the quota group is full.
> >
> > Any opinions?
> 
> 
> 
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