Enable Repeat Instruments

Initial Considerations

Repeating instruments are for projects that need to ask the participants the same questions multiple times.

Example: A study asks participants which medications they are taking at every visit. The same form can be used repeatedly to capture medications because it creates a new instance for every visit within the instrument.

There are no pre-defined maximum number of repetitions.

This feature can be used in either classic or longitudinal data collection projects

The Process

1.  Go to "Project Setup"

2. Scroll to the "Enable optional modules and customizations" section and click on "Enable" next to "Repeatable instruments and events" (circled in red in image below)
   
   

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3. Select which events or forms you want repeated.  Do this by clicking on the "-- not repeating --" box (circled in red below) and selecting "Repeat Entire Event (repeat all instruments together)" or "Repeat Instruments (repeat independently of each other)"
          

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4. If repeating instruments (and not full event), select which instruments you would like repeated in the "Instrument name" column.  You can also label the repeating instruments by typing in a variable name of the question you would like them to be labeled by in the blank text box (located to the right side)

5. (For surveys) If one wishes to allow survey participants to fill out a survey for an event more than once, they must enable an optional setting in the Survey Settings page.  This is done by doing the following:

   1. Go to the "Online Designer", and click on "Survey settings" button that's next to the survey you want to repeat.

   2. Scroll to the bottom and select "(Optional) Allow respondents to repeat the survey" (circled in red in image below)
      
      

   3. Set the custom text or the button and select the location of the button.  The options and a description are the following:

      1. Before survey is completed, next to Submit button – At the bottom of the survey will be a button to "Take the survey again" (as shown in image below).   Once "Submit" is selected, participants will not be able to return and make a new entry on this survey for this event again.   This is can be very useful when entering medications or something similar to it. 
         
         

          

      2. After survey is completed, below Survey Completion Text – When survey is submitted, will go to a page similar to the one shown in image below where participant has the choice to take survey again.  This setting can also be used to resend the survey for the same event, new entry (mainly done through the participant list).
         
         

          

6. Repeat instruments is now set up.  When you open a record, the "Data Collection Instrument" table will appear with the different colored dots to indicate if the instrument has been filled out or not; a blue dot indicates different statuses for separate entries.  Repeating Instrument tables will be below the "Data collection Instrument" table and contain repeated instruments and the entries made (as shown in image below).  Can add a new entry on these by clicking "+ Add new".  Can also add a new entry by clicking on the + sign in the "Data Collection Instrument" table

The image below shows what the project looks like when repeating instruments

Event 5 in the following image demonstrates what the table may look like when selecting to repeat an entire event

Example of the benefit of using custom labels: You want to enable medications as a repeating instrument in visit 1. You can have each instance of that instrument have a label to help you differentiate between instances. In the medication instrument I have a field variable [medication_name]. If I decide I want each instance to have the label of the medication the instance refers to, I will add [medication_name] in the custom label for repeating instance box.

The below image shows the record homepage for record 1 and you can see under “Repeating Instruments” that each instance has a name which corresponds to the medication of that instance.

The custom label can be piped data as shown below or it can be free text which will be the same for every instance of that instrument.

To get to the record home page you can click on Add/Edit Records > click on the drop down > select the record you want to view > and it will take you to the home page for tat record.

Reports and Data Exports with Repeating Instruments

In the report and data exports, there will be two new fields that are not present on instruments that are not repeatable. These fields are labeled “Repeat Instance” and “Repeat Instrument”. The instrument column shows the name of the instrument that is repeated, and the instance column shows the instance of this instrument (i.e., 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.)

If you are repeating an event, the repeated event will generate a new row for each instance of that event.  There is no way to include all data on a single row for one record when you are using repeating instances.  Data manipulation will need to be performed outside of REDCap  This is one downside to use of repeatable instances

Repeating Events and Instance Labels

You will notice that you can’t set a custom label in the repeating instrument and event settings when you turn on repeat event. However, you can go to project Setup > Define my events > and set your custom label in the custom label column as shown below.

Here I chose to pipe the visit date as the event label for each instance. When you go to the record homepage for a record, it will have each instance of that event in a new column with a custom label as shown below.

The double arrow (<<) above the third repeated event, allow you to collapse the columns to make your dashboard look cleaner.