How to create a slightly more complex diary study

Sometimes you might want to create a diary slightly more complex than described here. E.g. you might want participants to fill out more than just one questionnaire a day or want to include different experimental conditions.

The run you need to create for that looks similar to the simple diary loop, just a bit longer.

You might want to start with requiring personal information (e.g. demographics or personality traits) and email addresses from your participants here, too. This is questionnaire will only be filled out once and you can refer to during your run or in other questionnaires.

After that you can use a pause if you don’t want your diary to start right away. You can choose freely how long that pause is supposed to be: Do you want each participant to begin the diary on the same day? Then just set the date and time you want the diary to start at. You can also let everybody start individually by setting a time span. In the example here, each participant will start at 8 o’clock on the day after they filled out the first survey.

To let people know that the diary is starting you can send out an email with the participant’s personalised login link.

The next logical step is your first survey. If you just add it here and don’t make any further adjustments, participants will be held at this point in the run forever. Anyway, in most cases that’s not what you want. So you have two possibilities to allow for skipping a survey: You can either set an expiring time in the survey settings or add a skip forward. For the skip forward you can use The R package lubridate, define a time span and set “if user reacts”. Setting and expiring time is the easier way but a skip forward is more flexible.

Now you might want to add a pause again if you don’t want your surveys to directly succeed one another.

Then you can send another email to let participants know that is time to fill out the next questionnaire and add the survey to your run. After the mail is sent the survey will be accessible.

You can repeat this procedure (email – skip forward – survey – pause) as often as you like. Just make sure your email host allows for a sufficient amount of emails being sent per day and recipient. You can also send reminders via SMS.

When all your daily questionnaires are included in the run you just add a skip backward to the first daily questionnaire or email again.

To send participants to the end of your study when they're finished you shoud add a skip forward.

Now participants will stay in the diary loop as long as your skip-conditions allow. So the final step is to add a stop button which will be reached if the skip conditions aren’t true anymore or the skip forward is true (e.g. the diary has been filled out for a week).

Skip forwards can also be useful to define other conditions or to send different users on to different positions in the run. Let’s say you want to exclude participants when they didn’t complete enough questionnaires. You just fill in the condition and send them right forward to the end of the study. You might want to define a separate ending for that than for the participants who actually reach the end by having filled out the diary for the desired amount of days. You can also split your participants into groups. If you have created random numbers for them (as described in the item section for surveys) or want to separate them by traits you got in the first questionnaire (e.g. men and women or people high/low in neuroticism) you can also make use of a skip forward. Just remember to add skip backwards and make sure you fill in the right positions in your run.

In the example for the simple diary participants are finished when the have completed a sufficient amount of entries. But you can also define a skip forward for the number of days passed since the first entry or the date. The package lubridate is pretty helpful when creating a diary. You can also use it for calculations and showif’s in your survey.

You can download the XLSX-Sheets for the example diary here.