Using Quantum DSC for paper-based surveys
This topic describes the steps involved in preparing a paper-based survey in which the questionnaire will be authored in UNICOM Intelligence, but the response data will be collected into a Quantum-format file by a data collection company, for example. This approach makes it easy to read the response data into the UNICOM Intelligence Data Model for subsequent cleaning, weighting, and tabulating.
1 Create the questionnaire definition (.mdd) file using the Build tool in UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Server Admin or the UNICOM Intelligence Professional Interview Option.
If you create the questionnaire in UNICOM Intelligence Professional, you must add paper routing to the questionnaire definition file by running the CreatePaperRouting.mrs script that is installed with the UNICOM Intelligence Developer Documentation Library. By default, the script is installed in this folder:
[INSTALL_FOLDER]\IBM\SPSS\DataCollection\7\DDL\Scripts\General\mrScriptBasic
2 Open the .mdd file in Metadata Model to Quantum. Use the Allocate Cols and Punches menu option to automatically allocate card, column, and punch information to each variable.
3 Use UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Paper to create a printed questionnaire from the .mdd file. Include the card, column, and punch information on the printed questionnaire.
4 Pass the printed questionnaire to the data collection company.
5 When the Quantum-format file is received from the data collection company, use the .mdd file that you used to create the printed questionnaire to read the Quantum file into the UNICOM Intelligence Data Model.
If the file you receive from data collection company is in column binary format, you can use the Quantum utility rcolbin beforehand to translate the column binary into Quantum format. You can get the rcolbin utility from your UNICOM Intelligence support representative.
See also