sprockler users guidelines 3004 · users guidelines !...
TRANSCRIPT
USERS GUIDELINES
We have compiled these guidelines to help you make the most out of our tools. This manual will guide you through designing your own inquiry, putting it on our app and online collector to collect responses.
Check out other sections in our website for more information, we have case studies and example inquiries to help you along. If you have a question left unanswered, make sure to check our Frequently Asked Questions page and don’t hesitate to contact us!
Happy SPROCKLER-‐ing!
Content
Designer 2
Story question 2
Interpretation questions 3
Non-‐story questions 3
Bipole 4
Tripole 5
Picture pointer 7
Classifier questions 8
Entering questions in the Designer 9
Testing inquiry 14
Extra tips and tricks 15 Collector Testing mode 16
Personal mode 16
Interviewer mode 16
Mobile App Collector 17
Web Collector 20
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Designer In the Designer, you can, as the name suggests, design inquiry to fit your specific requirements and wishes. We recommend thinking about specifically what topic you want to gather stories about and consider the question you want to ask before putting starting the designing process. This section of the manual will help you with the design of the questions as well as with making them into a real inquiry. It will give you more information about what you should keep in mind when designing an inquiry and explains more about how to create our special question types.
Story question Inquiries consist of a story part and a non-‐story part. The story part invites someone to share a story and asks follow-‐up questions about that story. The first and most important question of the inquiry of the story part is the story question, the one that serves as the basis or context for the following questions. When coming up with a story question, it is important to think clearly about what it is that you want to know. Think about what topic would you like to know more about and start thinking about how you are going to look at it.
Secondly, it is important to think about the exact phrasing of your story question. The question needs to be inviting, stimulating and prompting to make people feel at ease and willing to share their stories with you. You can start your question with phrases such as:
“Can you tell us a story about … ?”
“Could you share a story about … ?”
“Could you tell us about a time that …?”
When thinking about the phrasing of questions, it is important to realize that asking a question sets in motion thinking about that topic in the mind of the reader and can so create awareness about that certain topic. This awareness can trigger change. A negatively oriented question can put the respondent in a negative mind-‐set that could influence the answers given, which is something that you would rather avoid. It is thus necessary to ask broad and inviting questions that can be answered with both positive as well as with negative stories. Asking questions can be part of an adaptive learning process for your organization or community. If evaluation is taken as a process of change, the feedback loops back into your organization or community when the question help to bring to light certain emerging trends or patterns. Open questions will result in negative and positive stories and thus give an idea of certain things that can be improved or looked at and other things that are going well.
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Examples of such questions are:
o Could you tell us a (short) story about a time when you or another woman tried to influence an initiative in your community? What happened?
o Can you share a story about one organizational effort you witnessed or know about?
o Tell us a (short) story about a time that was meaningful to you related to the leadership of the senior managers in your company. This can be either a positive or a negative story.
o Can you give an example of a time when you thought management handled a situation well?
o Can you share a story about a time when someone successfully took charge of a project? What happened?
o Can you tell us about a time when you felt your input was being valued by the organization you work for?
You can find more examples of story question in the example inquiries under the Resource section of our website or in our database.
Interpretation questions Following the main story question are so-‐called interpretation questions. Stories that are told contain authentic and context-‐rich information but the challenge is to understand that information accurately. To be able to do so as much as possible, SPROCKLER uses a meaning mapper framework. SPROCKLER asks the storytellers themselves to map the meaning in their stories through asking them questions about the story. Like this, we are able to elicit meaningful feedback about their stories from the storytellers that helps to understand their realities. As stories are only interpreted by the people sharing them, the chances of misinterpreting stories severely decrease, making the data much more accurate. Stories provide the qualitative data and the meaning-‐mapping set-‐up allows us to get to the quantitative data as well. Self-‐interpretation also further enhances the feeling of ownership and responsibility storytellers have of their stories, as they have both told and analysed the stories themselves. This is useful for adaptive learning. Additionally, by leaving the analysis to the storytellers themselves there is no need for analysts to interpret the stories.
This meaning mapper framework uses special types of questions such as bipoles and tripoles. See more about these in the parts about bipoles and tripoles.
Non-‐story questions Inquiries consist of a story part and a non-‐story part. The non-‐story part contains questions that are useful to get a broader idea of the context in which this story takes place but do not directly relate to the story itself. The non-‐story part also contains Classifier question, scroll down for more information about those. Through using non-‐story questions, the inquiries allow for the gathering of stories within their context and also enable you
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to learn more about a certain issue, theme or situation. These questions do not relate back to the story but are centred on the same topic as the story question. Think about what other questions you want to ask to know more about the context of this topic.
The questions used in the non-‐story part are the same as the interpretation questions, they only ask about different things.
Bipole One of the special types of questions is a bipole. A bipole is a slider that has a description at both ends and it looks something like this:
There are three types of bipoles and it is important to distinguish them as mixing them will have effects on their results:
1. Scale
The first type of bipole is a more traditional scale or degree slider Examples could be time or success versus failure. In a traditional type of slider the elements at each side are nouns or stand-‐alone values. For example:
The change mentioned in your story is…
2. Negative -‐ Positive
As the name suggests, a negative – positive bipole has a positive element on one end of the slider and a negative element on the other. An example of such a question could be:
The tone of my voice in this story is….
Element 2 Element 1
Your answer
Strongly positive Strongly Negative
Long-term Short-term
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3. Golden Mean
The third type of bipoles uses a Golden Mean to determine the elements on both sides of the slider. You can create this by thinking about what the best answer to a question would be and then taking either two negative or two positive extremes of that mean. This bipole is useful as it hides the true intent of the question. An example is:
The change in your story is…
For more examples of bipoles, please consult our example inquiries or our database.
Tripole A second special question is the so-‐called tripole. A tripole consists of a triangle with an element at each point. The respondent is asked to place his or her answer inside the triangle where he or she feels the balance most accurately represents his or her answer. Tripoles are very useful in that they can colour in the grey areas between multiple-‐choice options.
A tripole would look like this:
There are three examples of types of tripoles you can use:
Disruptive Insufficient
Element 3
Element 4
Element 5
Your answer
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1. Objective Facts
This type of tripole has objective facts or nouns for every element. This is for example useful to look at which topics are often addressed in stories, such as:
The community effort described in your story improved…
2. Balanced Values
The second type of bipole uses evenly balanced values at each end: one positive, one negative and one neutral. This bipole can for example be used to get an idea of the prevalent attitudes about a certain issue or levels of agreement:
Company attitudes about the effort in your story are…
Social relations Physical living conditions
Economic opportunities
United Divided
Indifferent
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3. All Negative or All Positive Values
The last type of tripole uses three values that are either all positive or all negative. This can be used to measure broader attitudes or opinions, such as:
The values of the leadership are…
These are just three examples of tripoles, we are sure you will be able to think of others. Coming up with the elements of your tripole depends on the type of tripole you have chosen, as for example, for the type of tripole with one positive, one negative and one neutral value, it is important that they are well balanced and actually represent a positive, negative and neutral variant of certain value. There is a variety of ways to come up with the elements of a tripole. The easiest way is to use a tripole from our database, the majority of which is based upon anthropological research. You can also ask us to help you out. However, the good thing is that you do not need us: you can also come up with them yourself. For example, before holding an inquiry, you could conduct a small-‐scale pre-‐research to find certain values that are going round or considered important in your organization. An example of a question that you could use for this is the multipole, which will be discussed in the next paragraph. If you repeat an inquiry over the course of a few years, which we highly recommend, your previous inquiry can form the basis of your next one. Repeated inquiries allow you to keep track of the development and spot the emergence of trends. Another possibility is looking into other research or evaluation that has been conducted in your organization before that could help you to look for elements of your tripoles. A last option is that you could go to the literature about the topic you are investigating. For example, if you looking into sustainability, there is plenty of literature that could point you in the right direction.
Picture pointer /Multipole Picture pointers are a fourth category of special questions that are possible to ask in this inquiry. You would put a picture pointer in your inquiry if you were, for example, interested
Accepting others’ point of view
Allowing others’ self-‐expression
Cooperation with the non-‐like-‐minded
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in where exactly something takes place. For example, you could include a map to locate where people are from or to identified people’s preferred locations for something, such as
In which region of the municipality do you live? Tap on the picture to indicate where your house is approximately.
Classifier questions Apart from these special questions, traditional questions such as: multiple choice, yes/no, open questions (with text, pictures or audio) can also be used. Open questions can be used for more clarification about a certain topic and multiple choice and yes/no questions serve another important function in our tool, namely that of classifiers. Classifiers are categories that are used to divide the data retrieved by the bipoles and the tripoles. Frequently used classifiers are age or gender. But other classifiers such as division or department of job, nationality, emotion attached to the story can also be used. It is important to think of the classifiers in advance but also to include classifiers that might make a difference that you do not know, give the space for their differences to emerge. Our Visualizer tool automatically shows those clusters or combinations of questions that provided relevant and significant data, so if there is no difference between the answers on the classifier gender for example, our Visualizer tool will not show you these results (or will provide the information that this combination did not yield any significant results).
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Entering questions in the Designer When you have identified the questions you want to ask and have familiarized yourself with the special types of questions we have on offer, you can start entering your questions in our Designer. Our Designer is specially designed to be as user-‐friendly as possible to make it easy for you create the best inquiry possible.
The Designer starts with a page showing you a dashboard filled with statistics such as how many responses have been collected and gives you updates on new added features. To create an inquiry, click the ‘Inquiries’ tab on the dark toolbar on top of your screen. On that screen you will see all the inquiries you are currently running or have access to. To create a new inquiry, simply press ‘+Create Inquiry’. This button will take you to the Designing page.
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Info
On the first page you can give your inquiry a name, a short working title and you can select the languages you would like your inquiry to be supported in. You can select multiple languages by pressing the control key on your keyboard. Press ‘Save’ and move on to the ‘Design’ tab.
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Design
You start by selecting questions and you can add a new one by pressing the ‘+’. For each question you can name it, put in the question text, select the type of question and name the elements of your question if necessary. Below the question text box you can select what type of answer you want to receive (short text, long text, audio, photo and/or video). You can also upload an image. You can put in whether a question is question, allow for not applicable or other answers. To make analysis easier you can also insert exclusion logic and group the question with others. Press on the ‘+’ to add new questions. Don’t forget to regularly save your work! You can rearrange your questions any time. If you are finished with entering the questions, hit ‘save’. Your inquiry is now complete.
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Translations
The tab ‘Translations’ gives you the opportunity to translate your inquiry in different languages. Here it is important to note that you can only translate your inquiry in the languages that you have selected on the start page of your inquiry. If you wish to change this, you can easily go back by clicking on the ‘Info’ tab and adjusting your languages. Don’t forget to save your translations!
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Publication
The next tab allows you to make your inquiry public. Using the inquiry in the testing mode can be done throughout the whole process and every time you make an alteration that will immediately become visible on your app or online collector. However, to use the inquiry in the Personal and Interviewer you have to seal your inquiry. Learn more about our different modes further down. The sealing can be done on this tab. You simply press ‘Seal’ when you are done with your inquiry. Making alterations and changing things is still possible, you just need to make to seal the inquiry again after you made any changes.
On this tab, you can also see your previous sealed version of the app with the time and date that they were sealed.
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Responses
The last tab on the Designer says ‘Responses’ here is where the responses to your inquiry are stored and is where you can keep track of how many responses you have collected. The analysis is done in our Visualizer tool.
Testing inquiry Testing the inquiry is very important if you want it to work well. We suggest you go over your own inquiry to make sure it asks the questions you want it to ask. Running the Testing mode of our Designer allows you to test and play around with the inquiry without collecting actual responses yet. Test it to make sure you haven’t overlooked anything, have polished all the language, test possible translations and make sure the questions target your topic of interest.
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Extra tips and tricks Some extra points you might want to consider about designing your inquiry:
-‐ Confidentiality: Apart from putting in something about what will be done with the stories you are gathering, you might also want to consider putting in something about who will be able to read or have access to these stories. In case the stories gathered could be sensitive, you can add a recommendation not to enter any person or organization’s name, if you think this is relevant.
-‐ Length: To keep the inquiry fun and doable, we recommend a maximum of 10 questions (potentially excluding the classifier questions).
-‐ Evaluate your inquiry: As a last question, we recommend putting in a question that asks whether the respondent feels as if all questions have been asked. The app allows for the possibility to add any question that frequently pops up in this last question. This additional feature is particularly useful for those who are intending to repeat the inquiry over time (short cycles) but can also be useful during the inquiry itself. Such a question could take the form: Is there still another question that you would like to answer? Ask yourself something and answer your question. This is your last chance to share with us something that hasn’t been said yet!
As last advice, remember to stay focused on what you want to know and to let emergence do its work! Do not overdo it in bipoles and tripoles, they generate more data and are more time consuming. These special questions are very useful in generating both statistically and explanatory strong results but should be carefully considered and not abused. Stay with your topic and do not let questions wander off from this topic too much. Good luck! Remember you can consult example inquiries if you’re stuck as well.
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Collector SPROCKLER has an app collector and an online collector. In this section we will give you more information about these two versions of our Collector. We will also provide you with explanations about the three different modes of collecting information that we offer.
Testing mode Testing mode allows testing the designed inquiry on the app before sending it out to the respondents. The testing mode does not store any responses to our server. We strongly advise you to test the inquiry before you send it out. You can test the inquiry yourself but we also advise you to compose a team to help you with this, so you can make sure the inquiry targets your topic of interest and that questions are not unnecessarily vague and are inspiring enough. The testing mode of our Collector is both for the app and the online version immediately available as soon as you start with designing your inquiry.
Personal mode The personal mode allows individuals respondents to answer the inquiry and submit their responses. For example, if you want to invite individual respondents to answer an inquiry in their own time, you would use the Personal mode. It is possible to use the Personal to submit more than one story from one person. When designing the inquiry, you can determine the amount of stories one person can submit. Just as the Interviewer mode, the Personal mode requires you to seal the inquiry before you can use it. The sealing of the inquiry is done in the Designer under the tab ‘Publication’. When you are done with designing or editing your inquiry, you can simply press ‘Seal’ and the Designer will provide you with a set of codes for the Personal and Interviewer mode. You can enter that code on your device or use the link to get to the inquiry, for more about that check the part further down on entering codes and getting your inquiry to work.
Interviewer mode The interviewer mode allows for collecting stories from more than one respondent using the same device. Additionally, it allows including questions for the interviewer to provide additional information such as ‘What is the respondent’s gender?’ or ‘Was the respondent at ease?’. The Interviewer works just as the Personal mode in that it requires you to seal the inquiry after you have finished designing or editing the inquiry.
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Mobile App Collector The App can be downloaded from the Google Play store. When you open SPROCKLER App, you can immediately see the list of inquiries you have downloaded to your smartphone or tablet. In the screenshot below you can see how it looks like, though initially you won’t have any inquiries on your app and could only see the blank page.
MENU
At the top left hand you can find the menu, which includes:
• Inquiry • User profile • Language • Settings • About
Inquiry -‐ Under the ‘Inquiry’ you can find all the inquiries you have on your App (same as initial screen).
User profile -‐ Under the ‘User profile’ you can see which of your answers are saved on your App. Some of your answers are saved only if the question was designed so. It means that when you get a question that was designed to save your answer, you will never receive the same question again. For example, this is useful for the questions like ‘When were you born?’ with the answer list like ‘a) Before 1950’s; b) Between 1950 and 1970; c) Between 1970 and 1990, etc. Answers to such questions will never change, so your response is saved and you will never receive the same question from the same organisation.
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Language -‐ Under the ‘Language’ menu you can change the language of the App. The App only shows the languages are supported by one of the downloaded inquiries or Android's system language (if supported by the App).
Settings -‐ Under the ‘Settings’ menu you can choose to use mobile data to connect to the Internet when you do not have free access.
In case you want to add large files like videos as your responses but have a limit on your mobile data, you can tick the second box (see screenshot), and only the actual responses will be uploaded (text, selected options, very small files, etc.). Videos, photos and other large files will be uploaded only when you connect to the Wi-‐Fi.
About -‐ Finally, under the ‘About’ section you can see our short introduction as well as our contact details.
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Downloading an Inquiry
To download a new inquiry, tap on the ‘+’ icon at the bottom of the initial screen (‘Inquiry’ menu), enter the code you that have received by email or that you got from the Designer. The testing mode will already be available but the Personal and Interviewer mode will only be available after sealing them. The Designer provides you with two codes, one for Personal and one for Interviewer mode. Enter the one you want to use.
The codes can be found in the Designer under the tab ‘Publication’ and on the first page of the inquiry if you have finished it. For example, you could have a picture similar to the one on the left.
In this case, the code ‘33eb2c’ is the one you should enter on your device if you want to download the Personal mode. You go to your app and press ‘+’ to add a new inquiry. Your phone will ask you for a code and depending on whether you want Testing/Personal/Interviewer mode you enter this code. If you want people to fill in this inquiry you can send them the personal codes by email, for example.
Finishing an Inquiry
When you finish answering the questions, you can simply complete and submit your responses or you can submit your responses and immediately share your second story if you desire so. However, first check the instructions of the organisation sending you the inquiry, as they might require only one story – it all depends on the purpose. On the other hand, this function is useful when used in the interviewer mode, as the interviewer can easily move on with the next respondent’s story without going back to the initial App screen.
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Inquiry menu
For more actions, tap and hold on the inquiry on the initial screen and you can see the inquiry menu from which you can select the desired action.
By choosing ‘Start Over', you reset your unfinished responses and can start the inquiry again. This can be done only if your responses are not yet submitted.
If you want to upload your responses at some point later, do not select ‘Complete’ or ‘Complete and run again to submit a second story’ when you finish the inquiry (see What should I do when I finish the inquiry?), and select ‘Submit Responses' from the inquiry menu whenever you are ready.
By choosing 'Delete', you delete the whole inquiry.
Screen shot of inquiry menu
Online Collector Data can be collected online as well. To get to the online collector, you work with the same codes as the app collector. For example, to use the case used for the app collector description, you could have the following codes:
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To fill in the inquiry online you simply add one of the codes of the mode that you want to use to our web URL http://secure.sprockler.com.greenhost.nl/collector/. For the Personal mode of this example, the web link would be: http://secure.sprockler.com. greenhost.nl/collector/33be2c. You can send this link through to your respondents.
In the top left hand side, you can change language.