Monitoring Commands

End_Mon_Interview/END_MON_INTV

Same as end_mon_surv.  Causes a Survent interview to run after each monitored interview.

Syntax:

END_MON_INTV <interviewer id>

End_Mon_Survent/END_MON_SURV

Causes a Survent interview to run after each monitored interview to “rate” the monitored interviewer.

If this is used, the supervisor starts a Survent interview after each monitored interviewer to record their rating of the interview session. The program automatically provides certain information to the interview, like the start time, study name, interviewer id, monitor id, etc. You must write a custom questionnaire called to ask the questions of the monitor.

Syntax:

END_MON_SURV <interviewer id>

The interviewer ID is used to name the questionnaire to use and data file that will be created with the responses to the rating interview; if the interviewer id is “MON1”, the questionnaire used will be “MON1.QFF” and the data file created will be “MON1.TR”.

“ENDMONSURV” without any parameters turns off the execution of interviews after each monitored survey.

Monitor/MON

Allows any interview in progress to be monitored from any supervisor, or external monitor using “survmon”.

If no station or interviewer ID is entered after the MON command, this command will list the active interviewers (by station number and ID) and their current status (in interview, between interviews, etc.) If you have SPECIAL,SEND_TEXT_LINE,SUPERVISOR_DISPLAY statements in the questionnaire, their text will be displayed to show the monitor at which question they are. In this way, the supervisor can see the progress of each active interviewer to help choose which one to monitor.

Syntax:

MON <#station or interviewer ID>

Example:

MON #25

An interviewer may be monitored simultaneously by any number of monitors.

When monitoring, the interviewer screens are displayed along with their answers. The word MON and the interviewer’s ID displays in the lower right corner of the monitor’s screen during monitoring. The compiler command -ALLOW_MONITOR disallows monitoring for the following questions, the monitor screen will be blank until moving beyond those questions.

Text question responses (long open-ends) are updated every 20 characters typed. You can control the length of time the answer remains on the screen with the “wait” command.

Wait

Set the delay between questions when monitoring.  Lets you delay the refreshing of the supervisor’s screen when monitoring. The default is 10 tenths of a second (1 second). The allowable range is 5 to 100.

Syntax:

WAIT <tenths of second>

Example:

WAIT 50

This command only controls non TEXT questions. For TEXT questions, the text is sent every 20 characters typed.  This would typically be placed in the SUPRINIT file so that it activates each time a supervisor logs on.