Suppose you have a question and choices as follows in Round 1 survey Q1. What is your favorite fruit? and have choices as 1. Apple, 2. Orange, 3. Banana. You now wish to update some choices for the same question in Round 2. If you update the choices as 1. Apple, 2. Orange, 3. Banana, 4. Cherry, 5. Coconut. It shouldn’t be a problem (as you are only adding the choices with the same code and label). Or you could also update your choices safely as 1. Apple, 3. Banana, 4. Cherry, 5. Coconut (if you have to update the choices by adding new choices and removing unwanted choices that existed previously). Here you will not see choice 2. Orange. But if you update the choices as 1. Cherry, 2. Coconut, 3. Apple, 4. Banana then that could be an issue later on as you are mixing up the choices label. You will need to careful with choices name (value label) that has already been used for any variable.
The same applies with the variable name. If you have already used it once, means it’s not safe to re-use the same variable name with for that project. You will need to use a different variable name. E.g. you have Q1. What is your favorite fruit? with the variable name Q1. If you wish to remove this variable and have another question you should not use Q1 for the new question you are planning. Take another variable name like Q10 or Q100 so something like that which is unique for this project.
It’s good to re-download the forms into the device manually as sometimes you may think it was automatically updated but in fact you could still be using the old version. It is also good to keep a version name or number in your survey project to track the form version.
Besides, please try this out in a dummy project before you implement them in your real project. This could affect all your data. If you are still not confident with this, maybe it’s still safe to have 2 different projects as baseline and endline. With this you should have all your data safe (if and incase you are not confident to make changes to your project).
