Sharing quota files between projects

You might have a set of projects that share the same quotas. This typically happens when you have sample-based quotas and the sample management script allocates respondents to projects based on information in the sample records or gathered on the authentication page or by a screening script. For example, suppose you have two questionnaires, one about winter holidays and the other about summer holidays. A screening script gathers information about age, gender, and the time of year when the respondent takes their main holiday. You want to obtain interviews with 500 women in two age groups and 500 men in two age groups across the two projects.

You can vary this approach by having additional script-based quotas within the individual questionnaire, or by having script-based quotas only so that any number of respondents can take each survey.

To implement any form of quota control where a sample management script determines which survey a respondent will take, do the following:

▪Create a master project with a dummy questionnaire script and a sample management script. The dummy questionnaire must contain copies of all the quota-controlled questions in the projects to which respondents might be routed. We call these projects slave projects. If there are no script-based quotas in any of the slave projects, just create a master script containing a dummy question.

▪Use Quota Setup to define all the quotas for the master and the slave projects. This includes the master project's sample management quotas as well as any script-based quotas required for any of the slave projects. Save the quotas using the name of the master project (this is why you need to have all the quota-controlled questions available in one script).

▪Create the questionnaires for the slave projects in the master project's source directory. To test quotas, place quota testing statements in the routing section of the script that use the matrix names defined in the master project's .mqd file.

▪Activate the slave projects and choose the master project's quota database as the source of quota information for each project.

When interviewing starts, the sample management script will allocate the respondent to a project. The questionnaire script for that project will run, but all quotas will be controlled by the quota tables in the master project's database.