Add questions to a diary study

Questions live inside activities. Participants answer the whole set each time they submit an entry, so the question set you write once is the set they'll work through repeatedly—which makes length and clarity matter more here than in a single-session study.

If you haven't built your activities yet, start with Add activities to a diary study.

Add a question

To add a question to an activity:

1

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

2

Click Add question and choose a question type.

3

Write your prompt and configure the question's settings.

The Options menu on each question offers Duplicate Question, which is the fastest way to build a set of similar prompts.

For what each type captures, see Question types in diary studies and the full Question types reference.

Choose an entry headline

In each activity you can designate one question as the Headline. That question's response then appears on the entry card and on the entry view, which is what makes one entry distinguishable from the next when you're scanning dozens of them.

To set an entry headline:

1

Select the question whose response should serve as the headline.

2

Toggle on Make prompt's response the entry's headline.

Tip: Pick a short, open-ended question that varies between entries—"What are you eating?" rather than "How did that feel?" An activity with no headline set leaves you with a grid of entries that all look alike, which makes analysis slower than it needs to be.

Recall an earlier answer

You can pipe a participant's earlier response into a later question's text, so the question reads back what they told you.

Type @ in a prompt to pick the question you want to recall from. Two rules govern what you can recall:

• The recalled question must be closed-ended.

• It must be positioned before the question doing the recalling.

A question that already contains recall can't itself be recalled from.

For more information, see Piping (recall) logic.

Decide whether participants can paste

By default, pasting is disabled on open-ended questions. This is to encourage in-the-moment, authentic responses rather than text prepared elsewhere, including AI-assisted answers.

However, if you intend to collect complex responses like URLs, you may want to enable participants to copy and paste into an open-ended question. To do that, set the Copy & paste allowed toggle to ON:

Randomize choices and branch

• Randomize choices shuffles the answer options on a multiple choice question, so their order doesn't bias responses. Rank questions have their own Randomize rank choices setting.

• Skip logic sends participants to a different question based on how they answered a closed-ended one. Skip logic works within an activity, not across activities. For more information, see Skip logic in diary studies.

How much to ask in one activity

Two limits shape the size of a question set, and both are counted along any single path through your skip logic—so what matters is the most any one participant could be asked, not your total question count.

• Media: up to 5 photo questions and 3 video or screen recording questions. Video and screen recording share the limit of three.

• Questions: above 15, Dscout warns you at launch and suggests splitting the work across activities. You can dismiss the warning and launch anyway.

For more information, see Activities and entries in a diary study and Media limits.

Tip: Remember participants answer this whole set on every entry. A question that's interesting once can be tedious by the fourth time. Focus repeated questions on what's changed for participants between moments, and save the one-off questions for a single-entry activity.

Next steps

Once your questions are written, publish the activity and run through the study on a real device before launching. See Add activities to a diary study and Test a diary study.