Add activities to a diary study

Activities are the building blocks of a diary study. Each one is a distinct task with its own instructions, questions, timeframe, and number of entries—so a study that unfolds over a week is really a sequence of activities, not one long questionnaire.

Tip: If you haven't decided how to break your research into activities yet, start with Design a diary study. For the vocabulary, see Activities and entries in a diary study.

Add an activity

Activities live on the Questions tab of the Setup page. Every new diary study starts with one activity already in place.

To add an activity:

1

On the Setup page, open the Questions tab.

2

Click Add activity.

Your new activity is added to the end of the list. You can drag activities in the list to reorder them, and the Options menu on each one offers Duplicate and Delete.

Note: A study can have up to 10 activities. Some accounts are configured for more—if you've reached the limit and need additional activities, contact your Dscout Research Advisor.

Set an activity's specs

Each activity has a handful of settings that together define how much work you're asking participants to complete and when.

Setting	What it controls
Instructions	What participants are expected to do during this activity. This is the most important field on the page—it's what people read before deciding what to capture.
Entries	How many times participants answer all of the activity's questions. This is a minimum, not a cap. Accepts values 1–99.
Days	How long participants should spend on this activity. Accepts values 1–365.
Scout experience	Whether the activity is completed in the mobile app or on a computer.
Due date	Optional. When the activity should be completed by.

A few limits worth knowing:

• Your per-activity Days should add up to roughly the Days per scout you set for the study. The two are configured separately, so it's easy to end up with a seven-day study containing fourteen days of activities.

• An activity can include up to 5 photo questions and 3 video or screen recording questions. See Activities and entries in a diary study.

For more on the device setting, see Device options in a diary study. For due dates and the reminders that go with them, see Activity due dates and reminders.

Tip: What participants actually feel is activities × entries × questions. Four entries of six questions is twenty-four answers, and it lands very differently than one entry of twenty-four.

Publish an activity

Building an activity isn't the same as making it available. An activity has to be published before it can be opened to participants, and activities are published and opened in sequence—you can't open Activity 3 while Activity 2 is still unpublished.

To publish an activity:

1

On the Setup page, open the Questions tab and select the activity.

2

Review and resolve any Before you publish checks. If you don't see this button, your activity is ready to publish.

3

Click Publish.

The activity is marked Published, with a timestamp of when you last published it. Publishing makes an activity available to open from the Manage page—it doesn't open it to participants by itself. You can keep editing a published activity and publish it again, right up until you open it to participants.

How and when the rest of your activities open depends on whether you've set Activity availability to manual or automatic. See Manual vs. automatic diary studies.

Next steps

With your activities in place, you're ready to write the questions participants will answer in each one. See Add questions to a diary study.

Before you launch, run through the study on a real device. See Test a diary study.

Frequently asked questions

Can I edit an activity after it's been opened to participants?

No. Once an activity is open it's locked, and there's no way to unlock it—the only route would be returning the whole study to draft, which Dscout doesn't recommend because of the risk to data you've already collected. Activity 1 opens for everyone the moment you launch, so treat launch as the deadline for changes to it.