Stealth Survey Queue

STEALTH SURVEY QUEUE

Initial Considerations

• The basic Survey Queue function displays a list of your surveys to a participant all on a single page, showing all surveys that are to be completed (like a 'to-do' list) as well as the surveys that the participant has already completed. 
  • Surveys can be set to appear in the Survey Queue based upon 1) if the participant has completed a particular survey, and/or 2) if certain conditions are met (based upon data values). 
• The Stealth Survey Queue will guide the participant to the next survey but keep the Survey Queue table hidden from participants.
  • The Stealth Survey forces "Auto Start" feature to be enabled for all queue-activated surveys.
  • This is useful if users wish to use the Survey Queue to automatically guide survey participants to the next survey without displaying the queue of surveys.
• The feature was previously an external module but is now integrated into REDCap

The Process
There is a new "Keep the Survey Queue hidden from participants" setting in the "Set up Survey Queue" dialog on the Online Designer. To enable do the following:

1. In your project's Online Designer click Survey Queue
   
   
   
2. Click Keep Survey Queue hidden to enable the functionality
   
   
   

What the Participant Sees

When the basic survey queue functionality is enabled but the Keep the Survey Queue AND the Auto Start feature are unchecked,


The user will see the survey completion message for the prior instrument/survey, will see a list of uncompleted surveys and must click "Begin Survey" to go to the next survey:



When he / she completes the second survey, they again see the Survey Completion Message from the prior survey, the name of the completed survey and must click Begin Survey to go to the next survey  

If Auto Start is enabled by clicking the boxes in the Survey Queue set up,
 

Then the Survey Queue will guide the participant to the next survey without showing the first survey's completion message nor require the participant to click submit

When the final instrument is displayed and the participant clicks Submit


Then the Survey Completion message of the last survey is displayed along with a list of what surveys the participant has completed


Survey Stealth Queue forces auto start to be enabled even if the boxes are not checked. The queue then works as above guiding the participant but not displaying the remaining / completed surveys



When the last survey is completed, the final survey's completion message is displayed, but not the list of completed instruments.

Summarizing, while individual surveys can have “auto-continue” option enabled in their Survey Settings (without using the survey queue), this does not allow customization to define which surveys are displayed.  It will continue to all surveys in the order they appear in the designer. 

The Stealth Survey queue combines the auto-continue option and also allows customization to display only certain surveys after specific logic is met. For example, if you have the following surveys in your designer: demographics, women’s health, men’s health, general health. If you want to continue from demographics → women’s health → general health for female participants, but demographics → men’s health → general health for male participants, you can use logic in the stealth survey queue to only display women’s health if [gender]=female and display men’s health if [gender]=male.