Sample quotas when you have No Access to the sample database

You do not need to have access to the sample database in order to set up and test quotas based on sample data. This means that you can still set up quotas even if you are a remote worker with only the Quota program and the questionnaire (.mdd) file installed on your local computer.

There are three simple steps to setting up quotas in this way:

1 In your questionnaire file, create a question whose name is identical to the name of the sample field for which you want to set up quotas. Make the responses identical to the values in the sample field. For example, if the respondent's gender is held as M or F in a field called gender, you would create a categorical question called gender with two responses named M and F.

2 Start the Quota program and create an ordinary quota based on the question you have created, just as you would if you were going to create a quota for a standard question. Do not use the Open sample management option in the menu. Define the quota targets and save the quotas to a .mqd file.

Even though you have created a question and defined targets for it as if it were a proper question, there is no need to add quota statements to the questionnaire script. because you want the quotas to be treated as sample quotas. The reason that this approach works is because when you use a sample management script that deals with quotas, and the quota control system finds a question and a sample field that have the same name, it gives precedence to the sample field. This means that the quota targets that you defined for, say, Gender are taken to be targets for the Gender sample field instead.

The advantages of this approach to sample management quotas are:

▪You get a true categorical quota, with text, instead of individual expressions as is the case with normal sample quotas.

The disadvantage is that the question name and the sample field name must match exactly, as must the responses and the values in the sample field. This is solely your responsibility.

To ensure that quotas properly increment, you must change the sample management script to pend the appropriate quotas (switch from pending only expressions to pending at the top level). To do this, set the PEND_ALL constant in the sample management script to True. When set to True the script is forced to pend quotas at the top level. Setting the PEND_ALL constant to False (the default setting), forces the script to only pend expressions.