How studies work
A study is a structured place to collect data over time. Where a survey collects one-off responses and remembers nothing between them, a study defines what you’re collecting data about, keeps a record for each of those things, and lets you record against the same records again and again.
Records are the centre of a study
Everything in a study hangs off its records. A record is one subject’s file: every dictionary field’s value, plus the survey responses, notes and activity attached to it.
What a record represents is your decision, and it’s the decision the rest of the setup follows from:
- A person you’ve enrolled. Participants join through your study’s page, complete onboarding, and get a record created automatically. You send them surveys over months or years and follow the same people.
- A thing. An organ, a sample, a device, a site, a case. These are free-standing records — you create them, your team enters data against them, and surveys can be sent about them. Nobody logs in as the subject, because the subject can’t.
Most studies are one or the other; plenty are both. A clinical study tracking enrolled participants and the samples taken from them is one study, not two. See Records.
Who’s involved
- Members — your research team. Members have roles (owner, admin, curator, data entry, member, billing) that control what they can do, from editing the study setup to entering data. Each member gets a record too.
- Participants — where your study enrols people. They join through your study’s join page, complete your onboarding flow, and see their own data through the profile form you design for them.
A study built around free-standing records has members but no participants, and that’s a complete study. Onboarding flows and consent exist for the case where a human is agreeing to take part.
Setting up a study
After the creation wizard, the setup checklist walks you through the pieces in a sensible order:
- Data dictionary — define the fields your study collects. See The data dictionary.
- Profile forms — choose what each audience sees of their own record. See Forms: views of your data.
- Consent statements — write and publish what people agree to. See Consent.
- Onboarding flow — assemble the journey people take to join: consent, registration, screening, approval. See Onboarding flows.
- Surveys — build the questionnaires you’ll send over the life of the study.
- Open recruitment — do this last. New participants go through whatever consent and onboarding you have in place at the moment they join.
Visibility and recruitment
Two separate switches control who can find and join your study:
- Visibility (on your public study page): Internal — only people you add can see it; Public — the study has a published page anyone can find.
- Recruitment (also on your public study page): open or closed. Even a public study accepts no new participants until you open recruitment.