Tasks in Detail
What are Tasks?
Tasks in Codeit provide a way to group variables together for the purpose of Coding.
This makes the configuration in Codeit both explicit and flexible.
Components of a Task
Each variables in a task will perform one of three roles:
| Source Variable | Contains the source verbatim text that needs to be coded |
| Context Variable | Contains some supplementary information or context data that is useful to display alongside the source verbatim text while coding. For example, demographic information, NPS Rating, product bought etc... |
| Target Variable | Contains the target variable that will store the output coded data. This variable will necessarily have a codeframe attached to it. |
For most survey systems it is necessary to be exacting in this configuration and explicitly map source, target and context variables in Codeit to the corresponding survey variables.
Defining tasks at the granularity of individual variables makes this kind of mapping easy.
Giving variables a role within a task also allows us to attache additional configuration options to the roles themselves.
For example, you can set the display relativity of context variables within the task (see here).
Flexibility
Tasks also provide flexibility by allowing variables to play multiple roles in different tasks.
Here are a couple of examples:
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One source variable, multiple target variables
Suppose you have a question "Q1" which asks "What did you think of your last visit to the museum?".
You might want to code this question for sentiment (positive / negative) and also for overall theme.
You can do this by setting up two tasks each with Q1 set as the source variable.Task: Q1_Sentiment
Source Variable Q1 Target Variable Q1_Sentiment
Task: Q1_Theme
Source Variable Q1 Target Variable Q1_Theme
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Target Variable as Context
Sometimes, the output of one coding task, needs to be used as a context variable in another task.
Taking the example above, it may be useful to display the coded sentiment values while coding the theme in the second task.
This is easy to do using a Task configuration such as:Task: Q1_Sentiment
Source Variable Q1 Target Variable Q1_Sentiment
Task: Q1_Theme
Source Variable Q1 Context Variable Q1_Sentiment Target Variable Q1_Theme