Changing Survey Questions and Options

sumApp was designed to enable you to test, reflect, learn, adapt and iterate throughout your project’s life.

To that end, the survey questions and options can be changed at any point. You don’t even need to close the project when changing (though it certainly doesn’t hurt).

Things to keep in mind:

1. Always remember to click ‘Save’ at the upper right after making changes!!
2. You can add a brand new question at any time without impacting other questions. You can also re-arrange the order of your questions on the canvas at any time.
   1. Add a new question by dragging the desired field type from the right side to the left side of the canvas, then clicking over the field options to open the Field Editor Dialog Box.
3. You can delete an existing question at any time without impacting other questions. You can also re-arrange the order of your questions on the canvas at any time.
   1. Delete an existing question by clicking on it and dragging it off the left side of the canvas. The field will simply disappear. The specific details of the field will not be saved, nor will the related data.
4. If you delete (instead of edit) a question or an option, that data will be deleted from the data-base. So – for instance, if you remove the question ‘Age Range’ – member’s previous responses to that question will no longer feed into Kumu via the live link. And if you decide later that you want to put it back in, your members will have to answer that question all over again.
5. You can EDIT questions and options at any time.
   1. Edits to questions will also change the question data-points in the database. If you download the Elements .csv file, the related column header will have changed to match what it says in the survey
   2. Edits to the options will also change the option data-points in the database. If you download the Elements .csv file, the options selected by your members will reflect the new wording.
   3. Because of 5.1 and 5.2 – be careful not to make substantive or meaningful changes to existing data.
      1. For instance, in the example below, assuming the survey has been open and responses have already been collected – it could be appropriate to change the question ‘Race’ to something like ‘Racial Identity’, but it would be very in-appropriate to change the question to something along the lines of ‘Groups I avoid’.
      2. Similarly, if you edited ‘Asian American’ to be ‘Pacific Islanders’ (sometimes a sub-category with Asian Americans) that could also be problematic, because you may already have non-pacific-island Asian selections in the database and re-labeling their choices could be offensive.

As of this writing, additional options can be added ONLY to the END of an option list, the list can’t be re-ordered.

• So, for instance, if you add Puerto Rico after you’ve gathered data in a state list, it’s going to be stuck at the end & can’t be put in alphabetical order.
• We plan to fix that soon and will keep you posted.
• There is a work-around you could use if you have Tier III or IV accounts – contact us for more info if you need this before we fix this issue

How to edit questions and options:

Click on the field you want to change (#1 in the image above) to pop open the Field Editor dialog box (#2).

To edit the question, simply revise the content in the ‘Label’ field  (#3)

To edit an option, click on the associated pencil icon (#4)

To add a new option, click on the ‘add’ button (#5), then scroll to the end of the option list using the elevator bar (#6) (note that they can’t currently be re-ordered once you’ve begun gathering data).

How to delete an option:

To remove a single option from a question’s option list, simply click on the associated X (#1 in image below). Be aware, this will delete any selections of this option from the database. If any related selections exist, you will get a pop-up asking if you’re certain. If you go ahead and delete will not delete the OTHER options in the list, nor will it delete the question itself.

Impacts to map in Kumu

If your data is being live-linked into Kumu from sumApp, the changes you’ve made to your survey will flow through. This may cause your selectors or custom filters to stop working. If that happens, you’ll need to alter them to match the changes to the data. (i.e. if you’re filtering on a field called ‘Race’ and now it’s called ‘Racial Identity’ you’ll probably need to revise that filter).

If you are manually loading .csv files into Kumu and you make changes to the survey, you run the risk of generating a messy data-set. At a minimum, you probably should delete the changed fields (from the Kumu field list) before loading the new, revised dataset so you don’t end up with 2 versions of the same question.