Help Review Form with questions to appear as matrices on KoboCollect

User Support Form Building
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Dear Kobo Community Experts and fellow users,

I am still a novice in form building and I often do it offline.
I have programmed a form for data collection on End of Project Evaluation. The form has some modules I have programmed to appear as matrices on KoboCollect. I have been following posts on the community forum people saying forms that they programmed as matrices, data is missing after downloading (that is after field data collection). Advise me if this problem persists with Kobo. Further, I would like your review of the form and advice on whether it is well-designed or not. Of course, I still have few areas to add controls. I have tested it with Online validator and it is deploying as well as on my Kobo account. I attach the form.
Chinguluwe AP CMAR-B Project Evaluation Household Questionnaire 27.12.2023.xlsx (84.3 KB)

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@ctmukhala, please be informed that the matrix question type is only compatible with the web form (Enekto). The Collect Android App does not support the same.

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A lot of questions for a household. I would suggest to pretest the form and esp. check the length of an interview.

Few hints:

  • Add the language code after the language in the title(s), see Adding Another Language to your XLSForm — KoboToolbox documentation. Or If you only use English only (and on English configured devices) you could even remove the ::language part.
  • Line 822 the expression in the appearance column seems wrong, probably should be in the relevance column.
  • You can reuse the same choice list for multiple questions, instead of duplicating them.
  • In all sum calculations review sure if all elements are mandatory questions. Otherwise you need to use coalesce(). See Form Logic - ODK Docs and ODK XForms Specification.
  • As selects are stored as strings, sometimes you may better cast them with the number() function, when using them in mathematical expressions.
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Thanks, I asked Enumerators to test the for on Tablets and they are saying where response options should be sen as Yes and No, they only see – *(dashes) how should I circumvent this so that I start all over re-configuring the form? Please help. Too bad that we want to start field data collection on 2 January 2024 at 0930 GMT

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You need to correct these two issues, please. You wrote ::English in survey sheet, but and english in choices sheet. That is the reason for the dashes. But need to be ::English (en) -same spelling and language code in brackets. You also need to add ::English (en) to all messages and hints.

Development & Design hints:

  • Do form development, checks and tests step-by-step. So, it is much easier to locate problems.
  • Finish systematic pretests, including data export tests, before starting field work. The later you find problems, the harder it will be to fix them (if even possible).
  • Use constraints to control data quality. You have almost no constraints in your form, e.g. invalid age, number of HH members, date in future, etc. can be entered.
  • Text size could be optimised, this has to do with your grouping structures
  • Sorry, it seems you have some difficulties using the grid matrix (or kobomatrix) design.

Maybe, you could study the different options for matrix and tables again, see

Here is an example Matrix01.xlsx (14.3 KB). I use a dummy (read-only) field to fix the alignment. Maybe the community can help with an easier option, please. Dynamic read-only is not yet supported in Enketo (but in Collect).

image
image1058×792 49.2 KB

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wroos,

Thanks very much for the guide, it is very helpful, I have revised my form following your advice

1 Like