Team Collaboration for Research Surveys

Research surveys often involve faculty, students, analysts, field partners, or lab staff. Domandata workspaces and shared materials help teams coordinate survey building, review, reuse, and publishing without losing track of the research instrument.

Before collaborators edit the same project, decide which workspace owns the survey, who can approve wording, who can change Flow, and who is allowed to push changes to the published version. That agreement prevents a small convenience edit from becoming an undocumented design change.

1. Step 1: Agree on the instrument map. Align on blocks, measures, condition arms, quotas, and codebook conventions before building.

   Step 1: Agree on the instrument map

2. Step 2: Use the right workspace. Open Settings to confirm team and workspace access for collaborators who need to build, review, export, or reuse materials.

   Step 2: Use the right workspace

3. Step 3: Build shared materials once. Use the Library for approved blocks, question batteries, consent language, themes, and repeated end screens.

   Step 3: Build shared materials once

4. Step 4: Share draft links for review. Use draft links during review instead of public collection links, and include notes about which paths reviewers should test.

   Step 4: Share draft links for review

5. Step 5: Assign final ownership. Decide who owns wording, Flow, quota, publish, and export decisions.

   Step 5: Assign final ownership

6. Step 6: Run a final pilot. Preview, publish-test, and export-test before live collection.

   Step 6: Run a final pilot

Reviewers can leave comments on any question or block. If Domandata is connected to ChatGPT, you can ask ChatGPT to watch a survey's comments: when someone adds a comment or reply, ChatGPT sees what was said and which question or block it is on, so it can make the requested edit and reply in the thread. You can limit it to one question or block, or to new threads only. Comments ChatGPT writes itself aren't sent back to it, and it can only watch surveys your own account can open.

Review what ChatGPT changed before you publish, the same as you would for a collaborator's edit. Editors in a shared workspace can also leave review comments directly, while viewers and translators remain read-only for general survey content.

Assign one person to own final wording, Flow, and publish decisions. Avoid changing live answer labels, condition arms, quota definitions, or recodes without documenting the change for analysis.

Conflict warnings are based on another editor being actively present in the survey. A collaborator invitation or an earlier access record by itself does not trigger a warning, and unrelated changes such as editing the theme do not count as Flow conflicts.

• Wording changes: note whether the change affects respondent meaning or only fixes spelling.
• Flow changes: retest every affected path in Preview.
• Quota changes: record the old target, new target, and response count at the time of change.
• Export changes: tell analysts when variable names, recodes, or condition labels change.

Teams can standardize consent blocks, demographic batteries, screening blocks, themes, and validated scales through the Library. Save assets only after they have a clear owner, a descriptive name, and enough context for another teammate to know when the material is appropriate.

When someone shares a survey with you directly, it appears on the Surveys dashboard of your personal workspace, marked as shared, not in a team or Lab workspace you belong to. Surveys that belong to a team you're a member of are listed in that team's workspace instead. If a shared survey isn't on your dashboard, check which workspace is selected in the workspace switcher.

Opening a link to a survey or panel you have access to always takes you to it, including links in notifications. If it lives in a different workspace from the one you have selected, Domandata switches to that workspace first, and keeps you on the tab the link points to (such as Deploy or Export). A notification that you were added to a team also switches you to that team's workspace.

Editors can rename the survey title in the editor header the same way the owner can. The title is stored on the survey itself — a reload keeps your rename and keeps the title at its settled width while the interactive editor loads. If a rename cannot be saved, the editor shows an error instead of keeping a title that would disappear on reload. If you opened the survey from an older create link that still had the original title in the URL, Domandata drops that leftover query after the first open so it cannot overwrite a later rename.

Editors can also publish, push changes, use response exports, and update the linked OSF Registration or preregistration state when the workspace plan includes those features. Viewers, commenters, and translators can review the survey but stay read-only for those actions.

Team leaders can share one invite link instead of adding people one at a time. Open Settings → Account → Team Workspace with the team selected, then select Create invite link under Invite link. Select Copy link to paste it anywhere, or Email the link to send it to up to 20 people at once. For a Lab workspace, all of this is on Lab Admin instead.

1. Already a member? The link just opens the workspace.
2. No account yet? The link shows the workspace name and asks the person to create an account (email, password, and display name). After they confirm their email, they come straight back to the link.
3. Everyone else sends a join request. Every leader gets an email right away, plus an in-app notification (and a push notification, if that's on under Settings → Notifications). While they wait, the person sees a note on their Surveys page that the request is pending.
4. Approve or deny under Join requests. The person gets an email as soon as they're approved, and the workspace appears in their workspace switcher. Someone who is denied can ask again after a day.

Approval follows the same rules as adding someone by hand: the workspace's two-factor requirement and Restricted-plan member limits still apply. In a Lab workspace, approving someone also assigns them one of the lab's open Standard or Pro seats. The request list shows how many are left.

A team owner can set the least privacy protection allowed when the team's survey data leaves Domandata. In Workspace Settings, open the team, and under Security choose a minimum for each place: Export Tab Downloads and API, Replication Packages (OSF, Harvard Dataverse, Zenodo, and Download), and GitHub Sync. Pick who the file must at least be safe for (My Research Team, Reviewers or Collaborators, The Public, or Answers Only) or No Minimum.

• Members can go stricter, never looser. In the Privacy panel, looser presets and column choices are unavailable, and a note names the team's minimum. A column set stricter than the minimum stays that way.
• Where it's enforced. The public API, the Domandata MCP, and GitHub Sync apply the minimum on the server to every export, and a new GitHub Sync repo saves it as part of what's consented. Export tab downloads and deposit packages are built in the member's browser from data they can already see, so there the minimum is a guardrail in the app rather than a hard security boundary.
• Changes are logged. Every change to the minimums is recorded in the audit log.

• Reusable Research Survey Materials in the Library
• Survey Participant Links
• Duplicate and Adapt Research Surveys
• Preview and Pilot Test a Survey
• What Is a Classroom?
• How Do I Buy Domandata for My Lab?