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The reporting field heading
When adding an answer component to a question in your online survey, you are required to add a reporting field heading. As Customer Success Managers, we often see this field not used for its intended purpose as there can be confusion over what it is for and where it appears.
The reporting field heading will appear as part of column headings for questions when responses are exported, and you’ll also notice that it is used throughout the admin end of Citizen Space, particularly in the analysis phase of an activity. Respondents don’t actually see this heading - it’s only visible internally to your site admins, department admins, activity owners and analysts.
You can select the below topics to learn more about it in this article:
- Setting up a reporting field heading
- Where the reporting field heading appears
- Amending a reporting field heading
Setting up a reporting field heading
For questions with a single answer component, the reporting field heading can be used to shorten and summarise the question. This is because the reporting field heading appears in the export alongside the question text or accessibility label, so it can be used as the column heading if the question or label is too long.
When you have multiple answer components in a question, the reporting field heading is important as a way to differentiate the columns in the export, so you can accurately delineate the data being collected by each component.
Where the reporting field heading appears
Skip logic
When configuring skip logic in an online survey, reporting field headings appear in the dropdown so you can choose exactly which answer components route respondents through the survey.
Response publishing
When setting up a consent question for response publishing, the reporting field heading appears in the dropdown to allow you to choose which answer component you want to use.
Analysis
As mentioned before, you will also notice the reporting field heading will appear in some analysis sections of the activity dashboard. The first of these is in ‘Responses Organised by Question’ - the ‘Display Options’ dropdown in this section uses reporting field headings to help you group by individual answer components.
The second section is in ‘Responses Organised by Respondent’. When you click into a response ID, you will notice that instead of the original survey questions, again, it will show the reporting field headings, to provide a more succinct summary.
It’s important not to use filler headings or the same heading for all of your answer components, as you can imagine this would make these sections or features far less useful for your activity.
Amending a reporting field heading
Once a survey is published, you are not able to edit the online survey section where reporting field headings are added. You would need to retract the activity if you want to make any changes, however, retracting an open activity has the potential to cause data loss for respondents who are in the middle of completing the activity (you can read more about amending a live activity here). As a result, we recommend having a plan for the format of your reporting field headings during the survey build phase.