The questions that your questionnaire or CRF is build out of, we call components within ResearchManager. By using these components you can easily build your personalized questionnaire that exactly fulfils your wishes.
Each component has a few base properties that are equal throughout data manager. Below you can read what purposes these different base properties serve:
- Component type: As long as no data has been entered in to your component, or components or other items have been made dependent, you can still change the type of the component. For example, you can easily change components from single answer to multiple answer while maintaining most of the established settings.
- Title: Each component needs to be provided with a title. In this field you ask the question you want to present to your patient, or you show what data you expect from the researcher in this component.
- Description: You can enter an extensive description for each component. This will be shown in the CRF below the information-icon that is on the right side of the screen. This way you can clarify why the information is necessary, or how it will be used.
- SPSS export label: Each component needs to have entered an export-tag that we use for SPSS as well as Excel exports. If you leave this field empty then the export tag will be automatically generated after creating the component. Consequently, the export-tag is used as column name in the export file so that you can easily find your exported values back at the right component.
- Validation message: When you use mandatory components, or components with for example a minimum- and maximum value, when the conditions are not met an error message is shown during saving the component. You can show an extra message that needs to be shown next to the standard message.
- Background colour: You can use this option to make certain components stand out in your CRF. This can be used for important questions, but can also be used to show that questions belong to each other, or to show labels with explanation even more clear in your CRF. BY using background colours for component smartly, a questionnaire can feel like a few short questionnaires instead of one very long one.
- Mandatory: Certain questions in research manager can be made mandatory. This way you can force patients and researchers not to skip certain questions: questionnaires cannot be saved as complete if the mandatory questions are not filled in.
- Hidden: You can also hide questions in the CRF. This functionality mostly comes in handy when you do not want to show questions that have been used before – at that point it is no longer possible to remove the question. By hiding the question instead of removing it, you leave the audit trail intact and simultaneously make sure new patients do not have to answer it.
- Save as missing allowed: By using this option, you give researchers the option of marking a question as ‘missing’. In this way, they can leave the question empty but it still remains clear that they did not forget to fill in data there but that it was a conscious decision to mark that the data is not or was not available yet.
- Export value for missing data: Questions that are marked as missing also need to get a export value – it needs to be possible to distinguish these questions in the export from the ones where they forgot to fill in answers. We recommend to use values in this field that normally do not occur for this component. For instance, we mostly use 99999 and