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Desktop Author and Interview Player, two our products from the Dimensions™ suite of survey research software, offer you an effective mobile interviewing solution. Develop a questionnaire in Desktop Author and then, with Interview Player, deploy it through handheld computers or other mobile devices.

The following process describes how you can use Desktop Author and Interview Player to create and manage surveys, deploy them to multiple machines, and move data to a central location for merging and tabulations. You can manually follow these steps or use custom batch files.

Creating a questionnaire

Begin by building a questionnaire in Desktop Author and saving the project in a new project folder.

Figure 1: Questionnaire files from Desktop Author are saved in a project directory.

After you save the questionnaire, Desktop Author will create a questionnaire definition file (or .mdd file) in the specified project directory. As shown below in Figure 2, the process will also create a subfolder called yourprojectname_files. This subfolder will contain any HTML templates, images, or other files used by the project.

Figure 2: Related project files are stored in a project sub-folder.

Prepare your project to be copied to the interviewing machines

Copy or move yourprojectname_files, the questionnaire definition file (.mdd file) for the project, into the yourprojectname_files subfolder with the other files. The yourprojectname_files subfolder can be copied to folders on each of the interviewing machines.

Figure 3: The .mdd file is moved to the sub-folder with the other project files.

Set up Interview Player for use on the appropriate interviewing machines

Copy the yourprojectname_files subfolder to a folder on the interviewing machine. The questionnaire definition file (.mdd) will be the file selected to run the interview.

If you'd like to track which interviews were collected on which machines, adjust the name of the .mdd file to reflect the machine name and number. In some methods of merging data, this source filename can be saved in a variable for analysis.

To run Interview Player:

• Access the C:\Program Files\SPSS Dimensions\InterviewPlayer\IPlayer.exe file directly, not from the program menu

Access can be set up in four different ways:

• Set up a desktop shortcut to the IPlayer.exe file. Users will be prompted to choose the .mdd file they want to use for interviewing
• Set up a desktop shortcut to the IPlayer.exe file with the .mdd filename parameter set in quotes after the location of IPlayer.exe. This will open the specified .mdd file automatically.
• Right-click on the .mdd file and select the IPlayer.exe as the default program for that type file. When a user double-clicks on that file, IPlayer.exe will automatically open that file.
• Change the menu item for Start | All Programs | SPSS Dimensions | Interview Player 5.5 | Interview Player so that the program location is IPlayer.exe instead of IPlayerConsole.exe.  IplayerConsole.exe opens a configuration screen. IPlayer.exe will open Interview Player and prompt for the .mdd file to be used.

Figure 4: A customized desktop shortcut can be created for easy interviewing.

After you've copied the project to the machine and set up Interview Player, the interviewing computer is ready.

Collecting data files from interviewing machines

While interviewing occurs, Interview Player will add several files to the project directory on each machine:

• The Dimensions Data File (.DDF file) is the case data file, so you shouldn't delete it. This will be one of two files that will be transferred to the main computer for merging and analysis.
• The Dimensions Metadata File (.mdd file) is the information about the case data. This file will be copied with the .DDF file upon completion of interviewing (or periodically for review of data as it is collected).
• The Temp Folder holds the temporary .HTML files that are displayed to the interviewer. This directory is not needed for analysis.
• The Cache Folder contains files that hold the responses for each interview temporarily until they are transferred to the .DDF file. This directory is not needed for analysis.

When you want to look at the dataset, copy the .DDF and .mdd files to the analysis computer.

The interviewing computers will continue to add data to the .DDF file on that machine. If you want to start interviewing fresh, delete test data, or collect your data in batches, then remove or delete the .DDF file from the interviewing computer after copying it to the analysis computer.

Merging datasets for analysis and opening the dataset for tabulations

After the .DDF and .mdd files are copied to the same location, merge the files by either using SPSS Statistics (formerly SPSS Base), the Data Merge activity included with Desktop Reporter™, or a data management script in mrStudio™.

To run tabulations on the new dataset, open the dataset in either SPSS Statistics (select “Tables”), mrTables™, Desktop Reporter, Dimensions™ Reporter, or a tables script in mrStudio.

Conclusion

Get into the field faster and collect insight efficiently with Desktop Author and Interview Player. With an understanding of the files, folders, and executable files related to these products, you can set up a process specific to your computer or computers and automate it with batch files. Once data is collected, the fun of data analysis begins!