Question Composer

The question pool is the shared library every survey and interview draws from. Rather than writing questions inside each activity, you build them once here, publish them, and activity composers reuse them.

Open Question Composer from the sidebar. It is Utility Admin only — a COG Admin without the Utility Admin role cannot see the entry.

The page has two halves:

· The pool browser — filters, search, and paging through existing questions.

· The composer — the form for creating a new question or editing an unpublished one.

The life of a question

1. Draft (Unpublished) — you are still writing it. Fully editable. Not offered to composers.

2. Published — released for use in surveys and interviews. No longer editable.

3. Deprecated — retired. Still attached to the activities that already used it, but no longer offered for new ones.

HEADS UP Publishing is the point of no return for editing. A published question cannot be edited — the Edit button disappears. Proofread carefully before you publish, because your only options afterwards are to deprecate it and publish a corrected copy.

Creating a Question

Start a new question in the composer.

The question composer, with an ISF classification selected.

The core fields

Field	Required	What it does
Describe Question	Yes	The question text as respondents will read it. Grows as you type.
Help Text	No	Optional clarification shown alongside the question. Use it for definitions or scope.

PRO TIP Help Text is the cheapest way to improve data quality. Where a question uses a term your organization reads two ways, define it here rather than trusting respondents to agree.

Choosing the category

The category determines what kind of question it is and where it can be used:

Category	Use it for
Cultural Pattern	Rated survey questions feeding cultural pattern analysis and the CPRO report.
Safety Culture	Rated survey questions feeding safety culture analysis.
Interview	Open questions for interviews and focus groups. No answer options — responses are recorded as notes.
Other	Questions that do not fit the analytical categories above.
Demographic	A general multiple-choice question about the respondent.
Demographic Department	The respondent's department. Used to break reports down by department.
Demographic Level	The respondent's organizational level.
Demographic Site	The respondent's site or location.
Demographic Tenure	How long the respondent has been with the organization.
Demographic Employment	The respondent's employment type.

GOOD TO KNOW The five specific Demographic categories are not just labels. Report filtering and demographic comparison charts group respondents using them, so a site question filed under plain Demographic* will not drive the site breakdown. Use the specific category wherever one fits.

HEADS UP Interview questions carry no answer options and are not rated, so they never appear in rated survey analysis. If a question needs to produce a score, it belongs in Cultural Pattern, Safety Culture, or Other — not Interview.

Classifying against the ISF

Questions that are not demographic are classified against the ISF using three cascading pickers:

4. ISF — which framework this question belongs to.

5. Trait — the ISF Trait, filtered to the chosen ISF.

6. Attribute — the Attribute, filtered to the chosen Trait.

Each picker only offers values valid for the one above it. The Attribute picker shows No Options Available and is disabled when the chosen Trait has no Attributes defined.

GOOD TO KNOW Demographic questions have no ISF classification — the pickers are hidden. Demographics describe the respondent, not a safety culture attribute, so there is nothing to classify.

HEADS UP The classification is what makes a question's answers roll up into theme and attribute scores. A question misfiled against the wrong Attribute still collects answers, but it reports against the wrong part of the framework — and since a published question cannot be edited, this is worth double-checking before you publish.

PRO TIP Seeing No Options Available for Attribute usually means the ISF is incomplete rather than that the question needs no Attribute. Add the missing Attributes in Manage ISF first — see The ISF.

Answer options

Categories that need answer choices show an options builder. Use Start Creating Options for the first one, then Add Option for each additional choice; Clear All empties the list. Each option's text is required, and options can be reordered or removed individually once you have more than one.

PRO TIP Keep demographic option lists short and mutually exclusive. Every extra option splits your respondent pool further, and thin groups make demographic comparison charts unreliable.

The two switches

Before saving, two switches set how the question is released:

Switch	States	What it means
Published	Published / Unpublished	Whether composers can use it. Unpublished keeps it a private draft — and keeps it editable.
Public	Public / Private	Whether other utilities can see and reuse it. Private keeps it to your own utility.

Save with Save to Pool, or abandon the draft with the discard button.

PRO TIP Save new questions Unpublished first. Read them back in the pool browser — in the context and formatting a respondent will see — and only then publish. It costs one extra step and it is the difference between fixing a typo and deprecating a question.

GOOD TO KNOW Published and Public are independent. A question can be Published and Private (usable by your utility only), or Unpublished and Public (visible to others but not yet usable).

Browsing the Pool

Filters across the top narrow what you are looking at:

Filter	What it does
Utility	Which utility's questions to show.
Category	One of the categories, or All.
ISF	Which framework. Hidden for demographic categories.
Trait	Appears once a specific ISF is chosen.
Attribute	Appears once a Trait with Attributes is chosen.
Search	Free-text search across question text.
Published / Unpublished / All	Filters by publication state.

Questions are shown one at a time, with arrow buttons to page through the filtered set.

PRO TIP Filter to Unpublished periodically. Abandoned drafts accumulate, and they are invisible to composers — so a question someone believes they wrote may simply never have been published.

GOOD TO KNOW The ISF, Trait, and Attribute filters disappear when the category is a Demographic one, because demographic questions carry no classification. If those filters vanish unexpectedly, check the Category filter.

The chips on a question

Chip	When it appears
Published / Unpublished	When you are the question's author.
Public / Private	When the question belongs to your utility.

Editing a Question

The Edit button appears only when both conditions hold:

7. The question is Unpublished, and

8. It belongs to your utility.

HEADS UP There is no way to edit a published question — not as a Utility Admin, not as a COG Admin. Published questions are frozen because activities are already built on them and editing one would silently change what past respondents were asked. To correct a published question: deprecate it, then copy it, fix the copy, and publish that.

PRO TIP The Copy current question to create new question button duplicates the question on screen into a fresh draft. This is the intended route for fixing a published question, and for building a family of similar questions without retyping the classification each time.

Deprecating a Question

Deprecation retires a published question. The Set Deprecated switch appears only when all three hold:

9. You are a Utility Admin,

10. The question is Published, and

11. The question belongs to your utility.

Flipping it asks Deprecate this Question — "Are you sure you want to deprecate this question?" Confirm with Yes and you get:

Question Deprecated — The Question was deprecated successfully and would not be available for composers!

Deprecation is one-way

HEADS UP Once a question is deprecated the switch is disabled — there is no un-deprecate. Deprecating a question in wide use means every future survey has to substitute something else. Confirm you have a replacement published before you retire the original.

GOOD TO KNOW Deprecating does not affect activities that already use the question. Existing surveys keep it, existing responses stay valid, and reports are unchanged. It only stops the question being offered for new surveys and interviews.

PRO TIP The safe sequence for replacing a question: copy it, correct the copy, publish the copy, confirm it appears to composers, and only then deprecate the original. Doing it in the other order leaves a gap where neither version is available.

Common Problems

What you see	What it means
Question Composer missing from the sidebar	It is Utility Admin only. A COG Admin without that role cannot reach it.
No Edit button on a question	It is published, or it belongs to another utility. Published questions cannot be edited — copy it instead.
No Set Deprecated switch	You are not a Utility Admin, the question is unpublished, or it is another utility's question.
Set Deprecated greyed out	Already deprecated. Deprecation cannot be reversed.
Attribute shows No Options Available	The chosen Trait has no Attributes in the ISF. Add them in Manage ISF.
ISF / Trait / Attribute filters disappeared	The Category filter is set to a Demographic category, which carries no classification.
A question is missing from a survey composer	It is unpublished, deprecated, private to another utility, or classified against a different ISF than the activity's.
Demographic breakdown missing from a report	The question is filed under plain Demographic rather than the specific category — Site, Level, Tenure, Department, or Employment.
Save to Pool disabled	A required field is empty — the question text, or an option's text in the options builder.

Revision #2
Created 2026-08-17 14:57:34 UTC by Ashutosh Mody
Updated 2026-08-19 16:25:38 UTC by Ashutosh Mody