General CAPI guidance

General checks

• Is all the content included?
• Is all the content in the right order?
• Is the nesting correct?
• Have the question grids been parsed?
• Are the labels correct?
  
  • When multiple conditions reference the same question, are the roman numerals correct? Use the summary tables in Archivist to check.
• Check the Interviewee, particularly for instances where it needs to be changed to Interviewer or Proxy.  
• "SHOW CARD" text: not included in MCS, but is included in BCS, Next Steps, NCDS, and USoc (main). Discuss with the team if this text shows up in other questionnaires.
• If there are missing spaces in the questionnaire (e.g., if a question literal said “these next questionsare about”), we don’t add the space in (e.g., between “questions” and “are).

Questions

• Has any text which includes key contextual information been concatenated to the question literal? E.g., text from a statement or from another question literal.
• Check for text in question literals that can be deleted from the question and added as a statement before the question - there doesn't need to be a hard return or line break to split it off. For example, a statement such as "The next set of questions are about your health", which applies to a set of questions rather than just one. The decision on whether or not to split the text off should be obvious. If it isn't, this suggests it should not be split off and so it should be kept in the question literal.
• Watch for month and year questions that need text, and sometimes instructions, from month question concatenated onto the year question (the order of the questions could be Year and then Month, and the text needs to be concatenated to month question).
• Have all the instructions been grouped together if they appear above and below the question literal in the questionnaire?
• Instructions vs statements vs question text is correct.
  • Check for text in question literals that can be deleted from question and added as a statement before the question.
  • There may be instruction text that should be in the literal and vice versa.  
• If text is added to a question literal in order for it to make sense, make sure square brackets been used (e.g., “what is your [child number] child’s date of birth?”, for a question which is included in a loop which asks about each child's date of birth).
• If instruction-type text is on the same line as a question literal but the text is distinct (e.g., it is in capital letters), you can remove it from the question literal and add it as an instruction.

Code lists/response domains

• Are the code list values and categories correct?
• Are the code list categories in the right order?
• Is the cardinality correct?
• Check that Don’t know, Refused and Missing have been added as categories to questions where these responses are referred to in subsequent conditions.
• We do not fix code lists (i.e. duplicates or labelling that does not follow protocols). However, labelling protocol is followed when inputting questionnaires from scratch (see the Construct a label page).
• Change response domains for questions asking about ‘Other’ from Generic text to Other response domain. 

Conditions

• Is the condition text and logic correct?
• Are the conditions labelled after the right question?
• Are the || and && symbols included the condition logic?
• Are the constructs inside the condition correctly located in the True/False branch?
• Check condition text for repeated conditions that can be separated and then remaining portion of conditions can be nested inside the repeated condition. 
• Make sure redundant conditions are deleted (i.e., ones that repeat so don’t need to be in twice).
• Watch for conditions arising from derived variables and check whether variables that make up the derived variables come from questions in current questionnaire. If so, add logic to the conditions using the questions in the current questionnaire. 
•  If a condition is labelled after something other than a question (e.g., a statement), we don’t put anything after the c_ in the label.

Loops

• Are they correctly labelled?
• Is loop variable appropriate?
• Are Min, Max and loop while fields correctly entered?