Q Research Software

Customer wishes to save the settings on the merging screen in Q where items get manually matched so that when they next need to merge their file again, it can remember these settings and not require them to have to match variables up again. !image-20201112-055528.png|width=780,height=575!

The user states that merging in Q is “a fairly manual but effective process but if you do muck it up and forget to match one, is there any way you can do it when the file is complete instead of doing all over again?”

The customer wishes to be able to merge data sets when the names don’t match exactly. This could work when using a kind of data map approach.

When merging data using Q, it is only possible to merge in new cases _or_ new variables.  It is not possible to merge in new data based on a combination of IDs and variable names to "fill in the blanks". The customer wishes to be able to merge in place data where the new file only has a subset of the records from the original file. In essence, it is merging variables but doing this within the original variables. !image-20210426-014731.png|width=902,height=225!

Customer would like to be able to merge a second data set with recontact data into another based on variable name and case id to effectively replace the content of existing variables.

There are times when users need to merge data sets that are from multilingual sources so the value attribute labels can differ. The customer wishes to merge in Q by using the variable values rather than the labels.

User asks: “Currently, if we change the wording on a response option, Q treats it as if it were a completely different option and recodes it with a new value. This causes all sorts of problems, as the value numbers start to diverge from our questionnaire, and we get multiple instances of the same response option that have to then be merged. Is there any way to override this default, so that instead of giving conflicting option labels a new value reference, it simply updates the codeframe with the new label (the same way you can choose to prefer either the source or donor variable labels)?”

Q’s method of merging is based only on variable name which corresponds to the Name field in the Variables and Questions tab but users often have data sets with the same variable label but different variable name. This means Q won’t automatically pick up that it is the same question.

In Q you are currently able to only merge two data sets. If you have more, you need to repeat the process until all data sets are merged. In Displayr, it’s possible to merge multiple data sets in one go.

User asks, “I have a number of Qualtrics surveys (all CSAT surveys but with different groups of customers) that I currently merge each time I need to work with the combined data. Ideally I’d like to import the data into Q using the API and have the data for each survey continue to update in the merged file over time. Is that possible, or is there a potential workaround solution that means that rather than merging new data in each time, it can update through the API?” Currently there’s no function that works on the fly and Q users don’t have access to the Displayr Cloud Drive to merge data sets in this way.