A participant Base is a database that contains the list of persons to be interviewed (or who will fill out the questionnaire). The participant Base is not mandatory and its use will depend on the methodology to be used in your survey.
The Participant Base allows you to assign cases to each operator (CATI, CAPI, Mobile) or to control access using logins and passwords in a self-applied Web Survey (CAWI). In the case of Web surveys the respondents will access the survey by using an ID and a Password assigned by you in the Base.
Yes, it is desirable to create and maintain the Participant Base in Excel. If you have problems importing from Excel 2010, try to save the sheet as an Excel 2003 file and then try to import it again. The Participants Base in Excel must have the following fields:
In this field you should enter the LOGIN if the interviewer who will be in charge of the case. If you want to assign the case to any interviewer, just use the word "ANY". In the case of Web surveys, you must leave this field blank or use the word "ANY".
This field is used only in Web surveys (CAWI), you could assign the same password to all participants to simplify the process.
Although there are no explicit limits of the participants Base, the larger it is, the slower the system might be. For CATI surveys to be applied on Local Networks, we recommend no more than 5,000 records, which could be expanded little by little, as you test the performance of your hardware. If Rotator has been installed on a "Terminal Server" you may use larger bases, for example 50,000 registries or more. If the survey will be applied on the Web and the Participants Base is large, the publication of the questionnaire could be slow. Use common sense depending on the power of your hardware, your network capacity and your infrastructure in general.
Additional fields are fields used to supplement the information that you already have about the interviewee, for example: AGE, GENDER, CITY, STRATUM, BRAND, EDUCATION LEVEL, SALARY, ADDRESS, etc. When compiling the survey, Rotator transforms these fields into single-choice variables or text variables which can be analyzed as any variable of the Survey.
In the current version of Rotator, the total number of fields supported is 21, this number includes the mandatory fields explained above. To add an additional field to the database, just select the option "Database Properties" and then click the symbol "+". The more additional fields you add, the slower the compilation will be, please use common sense.
Once Rotator has processed the entire Participants Base and there are no more cases to contact, you may want to load a new Participants Base from Excel. In this case, please have in mind that the Ids from the new Participants Base must be different from the existing ones. Rotator will not replace the previous Database, but it will add new records to it. It is recommended to add new records little by little, (for example 500), thus preventing a possible performance degradation.