I'm hoping someone will be able to help me out here.
I need to activate a survey via spss data collection professional. But i'm getting error at the end of activation. Error;
Unable to merge questionnaire documents.
The following error(s) occurred during the merge: - FATAL,Failed to merge documents Unable to merge due to conflicts: Q8 : Object exist in previous version with different DataType
This may have been caused by a variable which has changed it s question type
Could you please help me? What i need to do?
Thanks in advance.
Sincerely,
since the previous responses didn't actually answer your question, here's a way to fix your problem: rename Q8 in your original metadata, e.g. 'Q8_revised' (or better, a more descriptive name) using Professional. Activation will then not throw an error anymore. When exporting, you will get both variables in your output (if you export all versions).
Background: The reason your problem occurs is that after activating a questionnaire, respondents may have posted answers to questions, which would make analysis (to say the least) confusing if Q8 would exist with answers in different types. Data Collection will lock main question types: Categorical, Text, Long (integers), Double (decimals). You can, however, add or remove answer categories, numbers of allowed categorical answers and the permitted ranges/lengths for the other question types.
Finally, Data Collection will store the actual questionnaire (metadata) version used by each respondent so you will be able to always determine what was actually shown to the respondent when taking the survey, improving the analysis.