Using Colectica Designer for questionnaire specification – challenges, progress and future plans

Understanding Society is the largest longitudinal household panel study of its kind and provides crucial information for researchers and policymakers on the changes and stability of people’s lives in the UK.

Every year, the households in the sample are either visited by an interviewer or complete the survey online. The questions asked cover a wide range of themes such as family life, education, employment, finance, health and wellbeing. Some questions and modules are asked every year, whilst others are asked occasionally.

The questionnaire has very complex routings and can have over 50 different modules each wave. Therefore, it was necessary to find a tool that would be able to cope with the questionnaires from a large longitudinal survey and enable us to specify those questionnaires in a standardised format (using DDI).

Colectica Designer is the software we have decided to adopt and this presentation focuses on the challenges we faced, the progress we have made so far and our future plans.