Monitoring question helps you add a drop-down or pre-filled list to your survey form. You can use it to monitor entities over a period of time.

If you already have some information from a baseline study that you want to send to your data collection form as a drop-down; or if you are conducting a long-term data collection, where you record data about the same person, object, entity at multiple times, monitoring question can be useful for you.


It saves the time your data collectors spend and helps you track entities over time. In this article, we will discuss how you can create a monitoring question on Collect.


Creating a Monitoring question on Collect


Let's take an example where you want to monitor the health of some students on a monthly basis. In this case we will take the some basic information using a baseline study and then we will link that data to the regular data collection form. 


We will have two types of forms:

1) baseline form, which would contain basic details of the students

2) monitoring form, which would contain questions about what you want to monitor, the health details in our example


Step 1: Creating a baseline form


Go to "Forms" and create a new form. Add questions about the information you would want to collect in the baseline study. For example, Student baseline form will have student name, father's name, school name, and age as questions.



Step 2: Collecting baseline data


If you already have your baseline data, we can help you upload it to Collect. Follow the steps in this article to understand how to do this.

Instead, if you want to collect baseline data suing the Collect mobile app, share the baseline form with your data collectors.


Step 3: Creating a monitoring form with a monitoring question


Create a monitoring form, for example a "Monitoring Form | Health Camps" form.

To allow your baseline data to flow from the baseline form to this form, add the "Monitoring" type question and configure its settings as you want. This is the question the data collectors will see on the mobile app to fetch the lust of students from the last step.

Step 4: Choosing the baseline form for this monitoring form


Once you have added the monitoring question to your form. You can choose the baseline form under "Create Cases" for example "Baseline form | Health camps". 

Note: Your baseline form will appear here only if it is already published.



Step 5: Selecting the data you want to pull from baseline form. 


In this step, you can add all the questions/entities from the baseline form which you would like to pull into the drop down on the monitoring form which will be visible to your data collectors. 

Go to "Add case attributes" and choose the questions from the drop-down list. Click on "+ Add case attribute" to add more questions. Once you have added all the entities/questions, it will look like this -



Step 6: Decide which teams can see baseline entities

Check the box "Show all cases to every team" to show the entire list of students to all the data collectors who will be collecting health data of students.



Step 7: Update case settings to save these settings

Click on "Update case settings" to save all the settings. 



Step 8: Add other questions to be asked and publish the form

Add all the other questions you want to ask the students during their health check-in, for instance, "Date of check in", "Height", "Weight". Once done, publish your form and you will be able to view it on the device.




Answering Monitoring Questions on the Collect Mobile App


Go to the monitoring form on your device, and click on the monitoring question. You will be able to see the list of all entities accessible to you. 

Click on the download button on top right to update the baseline data.
  • Choose the entity you want to fill data for. For example, if you want to fill this form for a student named Satyam, search for his name and click on it.
  • After selecting the entity, you will be able to view its details in the form.


Note

In addition to monitoring question, Collect supports 25+ other question types like image, location, signature, etc. You can read more about them in this detailed guide.