Technical design of the web survey

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The Questionnaire Management System (QMS)

The worldwide WageIndicator web-survey is managed in the Netherlands. The websites are hosted on two servers in the Netherlands and the USA. The survey has a sound multilingual Questionnaire Management System (QMS) that was totally renewed in the early half of 2005 to facilitate a worldwide web survey. A next update took place early 2007 and December 2007.

The QMS is implemented in a Plone environment, using a Zope/Python based CMS. The QMS consists of a maintenance module for the datasets, a maintenance module for the presentation layer and a module for the selection process (the so-called search tree). The QMS has a codebook mode, presenting the content of the presentation layer, i.e. the questionnaire, except for the content of the search trees. The implementation was based in an Eclipse environment and is based on Java, Struts, JSP and Maven. Its management and data layers are password protected. Changes in the QMS are made on a test-server and are uploaded on the production server on request. The QMS allows for uploading and downloading questionnaire related information.

For the search tree application a management web application was build using Struts and Hibernate. The application uses tomcat with a MySQL database. The Socrates questionnaire engine is an Open Source project. The engine is extensively tested, both by the current research team as by the public at large, visiting the website.

A multi-country and multi-lingual questionnaire

The Master questionnaire is the core of the QMS database. It holds all questions in the database. For each participating country the QMS has one or more language versions, for example es_ES for Spain or fr_BE and nl_BE for Belgium. Each WageIndicator website offers the web survey only in one language. Countries with more than one language employ at least one website for every language. Within a country, the questions and responses in the questionnaires in different languages are exactly similar.

Multi-country surveys require country-specific questions. Therefore, the QMS allows questions to be switched on or off per country. For example, the question about commuting distance in kilometers is switched off for the UK, whereas the question about commuting distance in miles is switched on.

The question 'Do you have a mini-job?' is switched on for Germany and for Hungary only, as this phenomenon does not exist in other countries. This question is in the English language present in the Master-version and in the German language in the locale de_DE and in the Hungarian language in hu_HU.

If a question is switched off in the locale, it will not be shown in the locale's web survey, even if a translation is available. If a question is switched on, but no translation is available, the question is also not shown in the web survey. However, it is the data-team's policy that this does not happen. The major argument is that the QMS downloads are used for the data cleaning. The downloads show the on/off switch, but not the translations. Once a question is translated, but nevertheless is switched off, it remains in the locale. In a country with two or more languages, the same questions are switched on. Otherwise, data-analyses could not be performed at the level of countries.