Surveys, studies and organisations explained
Indacas has three building blocks: surveys, studies and organisations. Almost every question about how the platform works comes down to knowing which one you are dealing with — and, for studies, which of two shapes you are building.
Survey — one-off and anonymous
A survey is a questionnaire that collects one-off responses. Nobody has to have an account, nobody is enrolled, and by default you do not know who answered. It’s the right shape for a quick poll, a screening questionnaire, a feedback form, or any standalone piece of data collection.
Surveys are not stripped-back: they support every question type, logic rules, validation, piping and versioning. What they don’t do is remember anything between responses.
Study — structured records you collect against
A study is a home for a research project that collects data against records. A record is one subject’s file: every field you’ve defined, plus the survey responses, notes and activity attached to it.
What a record represents is up to you, and that’s the part worth getting straight early, because it decides how the rest of the study is set up.
Participant studies
The record is a person who has enrolled. They join through your study’s page, work through consent and onboarding, get a record created for them automatically, and receive surveys over months or years. Every answer lands against their record, so you can follow the same people over time.
This is the shape for cohort studies, clinical follow-ups, panels — anything where the subject is a human being who can log in and answer for themselves.
Databases
The record is a thing, not a person. An organ, a sample, a device, a site, a case. You define the fields it has, create records for them, and your team records data against them directly or through surveys. Nobody logs in as the subject, because the subject isn’t someone who can.
These are free-standing records, and they’re first-class: they get their own form — a data-entry view of a record that belongs to nobody — they can be created, duplicated and deleted, and surveys can be sent about them just as they’re sent to participants.
The same machinery underneath
Both shapes use the same pieces, so a study can be one, the other, or a mix — a clinical study tracking enrolled participants and the samples taken from them is one study, not two:
- A data dictionary defining the fields your records hold.
- Records holding the values, whatever they represent.
- Forms controlling what each audience sees of a record.
- Surveys collecting data against records over time.
Onboarding flows and consent apply to the participant shape, because they’re about someone agreeing to take part. A database of samples has nobody to consent.
Organisation — a free shared workspace
An organisation is a workspace for a lab, department or company. It is free. Studies and surveys can be owned by the organisation rather than by you personally, field dictionaries can be defined once and reused across studies, and members can be grouped into teams.
An organisation doesn’t collect data itself — it’s the container that lets more than one person work on the same research, and that keeps the work alive when one researcher moves on.
Which one do I need?
| If you want to… | Use |
|---|---|
| Ask a group something once | A survey |
| Ask anonymously, with no sign-up | A survey |
| Follow the same enrolled people over time | A study, participant shape |
| Keep structured records about things — samples, organs, sites, cases | A study, database shape |
| Track both, and link them | One study, both shapes |
| Record consent you can show an ethics committee | A study |
| Share work with colleagues and centralise billing | An organisation |
You don’t have to choose once and for all. A study contains surveys, and both studies and surveys can be owned by an organisation, so a solo survey today can become part of an organisation’s study later.