Set up your first study

A study has more moving parts than a survey, so it comes with a wizard to create it and a checklist to finish it. Work through the checklist in order and each piece is ready by the time the next one needs it.

First, decide what a record is

A study collects data against records, and what a record represents changes which parts of the setup you need:

  • Enrolling people? Records are participants, and you’ll want the whole checklist — someone has to agree to take part and provide their details.
  • Building a database of things — samples, organs, sites, cases? Records are free-standing. You define the fields, create the records, and your team records against them. The steps about people joining don’t apply.

You aren’t locked in either way, and a study can do both. See Surveys, studies and organisations explained.

The creation wizard

Creating a study walks you through seven short steps:

  1. Details — name and summary.
  2. Type — what kind of research this is.
  3. Goal — what you are trying to find out.
  4. Scale — roughly how many participants, records and surveys you expect. This feeds your plan recommendation and prefills compliance paperwork; it isn’t a cap.
  5. Collaborators — who else is working on this.
  6. Compliance — the governance details your institution will ask about.
  7. Plan — which plan the study runs on.

Your answers are saved as you go, so you can leave and come back.

The setup checklist

The study home page then shows a checklist. The order matters:

  1. Describe your study — a summary and description, used on your public page and anywhere the study is listed.
  2. Build your data dictionary — the fields your study collects data against. Everything downstream refers to these fields, so this comes first, whatever your records represent. See The data dictionary.
  3. Publish your public page — what potential participants read before deciding to take part.
  4. Publish a consent statement — what people agree to. Publishing freezes the wording so acceptances point at an exact version. See Consent.
  5. Set up a registration form — which details participants provide when they join. See Forms: views of your data.
  6. Set up a participant flow — consent, registration and screening assembled into one join journey. See Onboarding flows.
  7. Open recruitment — last. New participants go through whatever consent and onboarding exists at the moment they join, so everything above should be right before this switch goes on.

Steps 4 to 7 exist because a person is agreeing to take part. A database of samples has nobody to consent, so those steps don’t apply — set up the free-standing records form instead and start entering data. See Forms: views of your data.

Explore a finished one first

If the empty checklist is hard to picture, create the example study from the app. It’s a fully configured study — dictionary, flow, consent, surveys and records — that you can click around without breaking anything real.

Then run it

With recruitment open, the day-to-day work is:

  • Surveys — build questionnaires and send them to participants or records.
  • Records — the subjects you’re collecting against, whether that’s enrolled participants or free-standing records for things. See Records.
  • Participants — who has joined, where they are in onboarding, and who has withdrawn.

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