Below is a collection of documents to help you decide if Blaise 5 is the best solution for your organization.
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This is our latest Blaise 5 brochure. In it, you'll find what makes Blaise 5 so special, an overview of the most important features and what other users have to say about our survey software platform.
Blaise Colectica Questionnaires is a survey specification creator, and now integrates with the new Colectica Question Bank. This new tool allows users to author questions and sequences of questions with a simple, web-based interface. Users can tag questions with categories, add custom metadata, indicate how response data appears in resulting datasets, and see surveys in which questions have been used. All changes and usages of questions are tracked in the metadata repository for a full audit trail. Documentation about the resulting data can reference the source questions to provide full lifecycle view of the data lineage. Blaise Colectica Questionnaires can connect to Colectica Question Bank or Colectica Repository to use single questions or full sequences of questions within a survey instrument.
Using Blaise Colectica Questionnaires, surveys are designed once and can be published as PDF specifications, paper forms, Blaise 5 data capture instruments, and standardized XML. The tool allows rapid, iterative survey development and testing. Survey authors can collaborate within the tool, making comments and edits that are tracked in a metadata repository, instead of exchanging Word documents or text files by email.
In the past year, Blaise Colectica Questionnaires has also added support for in-survey search, survey validation, intelligent drag-and-drop survey organization, visual calculation editing, external data lookup, and custom Blaise code in expressions and rules.
This paper was written by Jeremy Iverson and Dan Smith for the IBUC 2020. It details new BCQ features and explains how Colectica Question Bank works.
Now that interviewers can conduct their interviews on Android- and iOS-based smartphones and tablets via the Blaise 5 App, we have developed a tool to help them manage their workload. Gina-Qian Cheung and Team Blaise worked together on the specifications of what we have named CMA (Case Management Application). Development started in 2019.
CMA's capabilities cover the following actions:
- Deliver sample lines to interviewers
- Manage samples within the interviewers' devices
- Download and install survey instruments
- Launch instruments in the Blaise 5 app for data collection
- Handle case statuses (e.g., record appointments, enter call notes etc.)
- Send survey data to the central database
CMA is available since Blaise 5.8.2. This paper explains what CMA is, how it matured, how it works, and what is planned for future development.
Collecting data on smartphones and tablets has many advantages. But connectivity can be an issue. With Blaise 5 apps, your interviewers can move about without worrying about their internet connection. Find out what Blaise 5 apps are, how they work, and how you can use them to your advantage in this brochure.
Watch the video "What are Blaise 5 apps?" in our
Videos area to see the apps in action.
The November overview of Blaise Colectica Questionnaire features with video clips as well as the entire video demonstration of BCQ.
Blaise 5 is especially useful when your survey programme is complex. This paper explains what a complex survey is and how Blaise 5 helps you overcome the challenges involved. To see what a Blaise 5 questionnaire looks like, please check out our
National Commuters Survey demonstration questionnaire.
The latest Blaise 5 brochure.
The latest Blaise Colectica Questionnaires brochure about the BCQ’s benefits includes video clips to demonstrate the features as well as the entire demonstration video made by Colectica.
A white paper by Barry Schouten and Ralph Dolmans about the Data Collection Innovation Network (WIN). WIN focuses on mobile device surveys and mobile device sensors. This paper details the areas of focus as well as the goals to expand Blaise's functionality.
A white paper by Mike Pierzchala about the importance of mixed-mode surveys. This paper explains the technical challenges of such surveys and lists tools to overcome them.
A summary of the IBUC 2016 and its topics.
The Blaise 5 brochure from 2017
Information sheet about the Data Collection Innovation Network (WIN), a collaboration between CBS and Utrecht University.
Information sheet about the Blaise community.
Information sheet about the benefits of integrating Blaise into the Visual Survey Designers by Colectica.
Information sheet about our collaboration with Colectica.
This information sheet summarises the continued importance of primary observation.
Infographic showing the difficulties of multimode surveys and how Blaise 5 overcomes them.
Blaise 4 is used widely around the globe. Driven by technological changes and user requirements, it has been continuously improved since its first version in 1998. Blaise 4's successor is Blaise 5. Watch this video to see the benefits of transitioning to Blaise 5.
Customizing layout, menu items, menu text and language and other special applications
There are many layout control options in Blaise. For example, you can add layout and text fill controls in a question text. The modelib editor, enables you to customize the layout (fonts, position and colours for all panels) of a questionnaire and lots of behaviour options (such as autosave and dynamic routing). The Blaise Menu editor lets you customize the displayed menu items and adapt the used text (and their language) for data entry. You can define buttons in one or more (dockable) panels. Furthermore, the appearance of certain field types can be controlled by applying a value mask. This can also be used to define restrictions on valid data entry (for example, accepting only numerical values in a string field). For selecting a category value (enumeration value), the answer list may appear just as text with radio buttons, or as a list box or just as an open space where the right answer should be typed. This can be controlled in the "datamodel properties".
The successor of Blaise 4.8 is being completely rewritten in .NET. It has the advantage that it is suitable for new platforms / technologies such as smartphones and tablets. The web part is being completely renewed to meet today’s standards. It is 508/WCAG 2.0 and HIPAA compliant.
So far, the emphasis of development has mainly centered on the layout, but it is increasingly moving into the next stage: case management.
Customizing layout
Blaise 5 has disconnected layout from content. The data model is still the same, but the layout section is no longer used. Instead, a Resource Editor (similar to the modelib editor in Blaise 4) is used to create a Resource Database. This separate file can be reused over multiple questionnaires. The values and properties as set in that database can be changed for every separate question in the data model. These values and properties can also differ between modes (layout set groups), styles or even languages, making Blaise 5 a very flexible tool. It is possible to create a house-style for your organization. You can also still add text fill controls in the data model.