3. Creating Your Study



Getting Started


The study investigator website is the place where investigators can create, edit and manage their studies. You can access the website via
  •  https://grouptheory.tech:742 
  •  https://grouptheory.tech:442 

You could access the site easily via signing in with google.

Principal Vs Participating Studies


After logging on to the website, you will see two tabs: Principal Studies and Partner Studies.

  • Principal studies are studies you created.
  • Partner studies are studies where another investigator added you as a participating investigator. Participating investigators may have fewer capabilities compared to the leading investigators. How much capabilities you have as a participating investigator depends on how much was granted to you.

Creating A Study


When you click on the "Create New" button next to Leading Studies, you will see a graphical user interface that looks like this:

Here are some things that you should know:
 
  • The study name has to be unique
  • The study description section is just for the investigator. This will not be visible to participants
  • The study is created with pre-defined information which should be updated afterward



  • Duration determines how long (in days) answers and sensor data will be collected.
    The duration begins from the moment the user consents to the study on the app. For example, if the study duration is 7 days and user A registers and consents on Monday 11 AM, then the study, for A, will end next Monday 11 AM. On the other hand, user B registers on Tuesday 2 PM. The study will end next Tuesday 2 PM for B.
    The user is considered to have consented when the consent forms are completed. If there are no in-app consent forms, then the consent agreed time is the time when the user registers using the coupon.
    End Of Study rules will use the duration to determine when to trigger.
  • You may add new sensors to the study as long as the study is still in the Preparing phase.


In-App Administrator Passcode


After creating the study, you can click on the "EDIT STUDY" button and go to the About page of your study.

On the About page, you will notice that there is a passcode which is randomly generated for each study.
You can use the passcode to access the Investigator Access section of the ODIN app. Currently, the section only has the following features:
  • Question viewer, which allows us to view all questions in the study and its rendering
  • Rule viewer, view configured rules for the study
  • Pull data from the server
  • Upload data onto the server


Payout Setup


This section allows you to configure the allowed payment options for your study. This can only be modfied when study phrase is in the Preparing phrase.

We support the following
    No participant-initiated payments With this option, payment requests cannot be initiated by participants via the app
    Participant-initiated final paymentA single payment request can be initiated by participants after study participation is done via the app
    Ongoing participant-initiated paymentsParticipant could request payment as long as they have earned enough via the app


Payments page


The payments page allows you to manage and report payments made by you, or requested by a participant.
You will find three main tables on this page:
    Requests from participants: displays any incoming requests for payment made by participants of the study. More on this below.
    In-progress payments: displays payments that have been created by you (i.e., special allowances, one-off incentives, etc), but have not yet been confirmed. In special scenarios, payments requested by participants could also end up in this state.
    Finalized payments: displays payments that have reached a final state, namely cancelled (initiated by you and then cancelled), rejected (initiated by the participant and rejected), or completed (initiated by either you or the participant, and completed).
Important: currently, ODIN does not deal directly with payment platforms. Reporting a payment is only an accounting action, useful for budget management. E.g.: ODIN will use this information to prevent you from printing coupons beyond your established budget.


Remote payments (participant-initiated).

For a participant to be able to request a payment from the app, three conditions must be met:
    You've enabled any form of participant-initiated payments on the  Payout setup page⁠ .
    The participant has configured a payment provider on their app (Settings > Connect your payment).
    The participant has a due amount.
If all three of these conditions are met, the participant will be able to request a payment from the Earnings page:
Once a payment has been requested from the app, you will see it on the "Requests from participants" table:
You can then confirm or reject the payment. In this case we confirm it, so it gets transferred to the "Finalized payments" table below:
Note that ODIN automatically suggests the current due amount to you, but allows you to change it.


Manual payments (researcher-initiated).

Aside from participants requesting payments, you are free to report handouts at any time. For that, use the "Report a payment" button, which will ask you to select a coupon, define an amount, and confirm or cancel the operation.
Note that a "manual" payment does not necessarily mean a cash handout. In fact, you could pay the participant by any mean you please, since ODIN is just keeping track of the budgetary implications for you.
As with previous examples, ODIN will inform you about the currently due amount. In the example above, we are overpaying a participant by 1 dollar.
After a while (generally less than an hour), the participant will see this information reflected on the app:
And they can even see the transaction history:


Budget implications.

As stated before, ODIN will use the Payments you report, as well as preemptive computations of all of the available incentives in your study, to keep track of your budget.

The ability to report payments of arbitrary amounts should thus be used carefully, since it could impact how many coupons you can print.
ODIN will not allow you to print coupons beyond your budget. If you report extraordinary payments, this will have an impact on the amount of participants you can enroll.
In the example above, we report an extraordinary payment of $5000 dollars, in a study where the initial budget was $5400.
The impact of such action can be seen graphically on the Budget page:

If you happen to have made a mistake, or want to accommodate a change in plans, you can always increase the study's budget on the About page.
An in-progress study's budget can only be increased, never decreased.



Questions


On the survey page, you can create questions and rules. We are constantly adding new questions and rules. Below is a list of the most notable.


Fill Text

Multiple Choice

  • Single Select (Radio Button)
  • Multi-Select (Checkboxes)

For multiple-choice questions, the maximum number of responses determines what type of multiple-choice question it is. If the value is one, then it will show radio buttons. If the value is greater than one, then it will show checkboxes.

The minimum number of responses is used for questions where you want to participant to select the exact X number of choices. It can never be less than one.

For single select, use 1 for both the maximum and minimum number of responses. For multi-select, the maximum has to be greater than 1 and the minimum has to be less than or equal to the max.


Fill Number



Psychometric A, B and C



Random Prompt

Display a random prompt, picked from the provided list in the attached file.
The attached file has to be single-column CSV with a list of prompts to pick from; e.g.:

ExampleRandomPrompt.csv
67Bytes, Uploaded 6 months ago


Rules


Rules can either be triggered on the phone or the server and are added to questions like this:

If the rule is on the phone, then it is more responsive because everything is done locally on the phone and you do not need to wait for a server push notification or worry about not having an internet connection.

On the other hand, for server-based rules, the server will retry sending missed push notifications to the phone for a limited number of tries. This is helpful in cases such as missing time-based rule firings due to the phone being off.



Consent Forms


You should remember to edit the consent forms for your study because chances are that the defaults will not make sense for your study.

You also can turn off the consent forms and toggle whether you want a name and signature.




Contacts


The information that you enter on the Contacts page will be shown to the participant in the app. The instructions are for everyone, and not one per investigator.




Study Phases


ODIN studies have three different phases, each of which is associated with a different color.
Title
Title
Title
Title
Title
Title
Phase
Add/Edit Sensors
Edit Study Duration
Edit Consent Forms
Add/Edit Investigator Contact Details
Delete Study
Preparing
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
In-Progress
No
No
No
No
No
Completed
No
No
No
No
No
Title
Title
Title
Title
Phase
Add New Questions and Rules
Edit Published Questions And Rules
Allow Coupon Registration
Preparing
Yes
N/A, No published items yet
No
In-Progress
Yes
No
Yes
Completed
No
No
No
  • After creating a new study or copying an existing study, the newly created or copied study will be in the Preparing phase.
  • You can move the study to the next phase in the Study Phases section.
  • You can never go back to a previous phase. You can only go forward to the next phase.



Finishing Up


When you are ready, you can generate some coupons in the Participants section and then move the study from Preparing to In-Progress. If you ever need more coupons, you can generate more while in the study is in In-Progress.