Introduction

If your survey is a long-running project (e.g. a tracking study), is very large, or has repeat phases it is a good idea to organise your data into Waves within your codeit project.
When you do this, your interviews are partitioned into separate silos, or "Waves" within your project.
This makes the managing and controlling the project in codeit much easier as you only need to work with one wave at a time, rather than all of the data together. 


Selecting a Wave Variable

In order to use a Wave variable in your project, click the "Use Wave Variable" checkbox.
This will display a drop-down containing all of the closed-end questions in your survey.  You can use any closed-end question as a wave variable, however it is most common to use time-based variables like Week Number, Month, Quarter and so on. 
During the sync process, codeit will create one wave for each option in the closed-end question. Adding options to the closed-end question in the survey system will trigger the creation of new waves in codeit during the sync process. 
When interview data is loaded into codeit the response given to the wave question will dictate which wave that interview is assigned to. 





Existing Projects 

Note that this option is only available when setting up a new project for the first time.
If you are using the Data Link Wizard to edit the setup for an existing project, then the Wave Variable controls will be disabled. The wave variable setting is restricted in this way because changing it would invalidate any data already loaded from the target system and/or any coding work already done.
If you have an existing project and need to make changes to the Wave Variable setting, then please contact codeit support.