dhis2-devs team mailing list archive

[Knut Staring <knutst@xxxxxxxxx>]

In the context of storing data from survey questionnaires such as health
facility Service Availability Mapping, a common occurrence is "dropdown
questions", i.e. where the answer is selected from a predefined list of
options (enumerations). It occurred to me that this is a bit like custom
dimensions - and survey data are often analysed/broken down according to
such responses.

It would seem helpful to handle this as part of our overall rethinking of
dimensionality (where "data element" is in fact just one "privileged",
compulsory dimension out of many possible ones, though we typically tend to
think of it as "disease"). The problem I guess is that with such choice
questions, there is not really a datavalue - i.e. the dimension option
becomes the datavalue to be stored.

Or am I way out in the left field here?

I suppose we would have a problem with the "Other" option, which is usually
accompanied by a free text field in a survey...

Knut