Nfield update – 31 August 2021

On Tuesday 31 August we will release a new version of Nfield. This update contains information on our new system protection, a NIPO DSC, an alternative way to retrieve software and documentation and several smaller improvements.

Stopping interviews based on metrics
As communicated on 20 July, from this update on, we will stop interviews that reach the "stop" threshold for one of the metrics. This is to protect the system and your other interviews from being overloaded by errors in scripts that accidentally ask extreme amounts of computing resources (infinite loops, very heavy calculations that are repeated too many times, etc.).

What will happen when an interview reaches a threshold? It will be stopped by the Nfield system and will get the response code 108 (Stopped, exceeded metric thresholds). The respondent will get the message (below) on screen, and will no longer be able to continue with the interview.

Any interview that has response code 108 is no longer available to be completed until the script has been changed and published. After publishing a new script (and hopefully fixing the issue that caused the problem), the interview is allowed to continue.

The survey itself will get a black pill message "using excessive resources" in the Surveys list if it has been system-stopped in the past 7 days.

You can find the interviews that are blocked by filtering the Sample table by response code, selecting Response Code is [108 (Stopped, exceeded metric thresholds)].

We would like to again mention here that the number of interviews stopped by our system should be minimal. And those we do stop are guaranteed to have provided a bad experience to the respondents because they take up a lot of resources and thus time to navigate through the survey. Even worse, they also create a bad experience for the respondents of other interviews that share the same resources.

NIPO plans to hold new NIPO Academy sessions on the metrics very soon. An invitation email to attend will be sent in a couple of weeks.

NIPO DSC for IBM SPSS
A new version of the NIPO DSC has been released. The NIPO DSC for IBM SPSS is NIPO's data source component for the IBM SPSS Data Collection Data Model. It allows the user to open and use Nfield data directly in PASW Statistics, IBM SPSS Data Collection Survey Reporter and IBM SPSS Data Collection Base Professional.

What has been improved:

• Fixed a bug as it could not handle floating point numbers in combination with a button *BUT.

The latest version of the NIPO DSC for IBM SPSS is now 2.00.011. The NIPO DSC can be downloaded from the NIPO website.

Software and documentation, Academy videos and useful tools
Due to a technical issue NIPO had to retire the support website that was in place. The functionality offered then is still available now:

• Download software and documentation; to be done via this form.
• Watch NIPO Academy sessions; an Academy videos section has been created.
• Download tools; on the new Useful Tools section.

To download software and documentation, authentication is done based on your email address and phone number registered in our CRM database. Send a message to support if you do not know the credentials used for this process, also there is a form to retrieve the phone number we use.

Miscellaneous
With this update we addressed several enhancements to help our users with their fieldwork. Noteworthy are:

• We fixed a bug on the Interviewers page where sometimes the Save option would not appear.
• We fixed a bug that in some cases caused irregular behavior of the buttons in our data tables in the Nfield Manager.

As always, please share this information with all relevant people in your organization.

Kind regards,