Pre-entry forms

Pre-entry forms are questionnaires used to gather data from parents and school which can be entered into the 3di prior to running the interview with the parents.

To make it easy to transcribe to the 3di from a pre-entry form, the Route Explorer provides a Route corresponding to each form: the Route will present the 3di questions in precisely the order in which they appear on the pre-entry form.

The three sources of pre-entry forms

1. Provided pre-entry forms: some forms are provided in the PreEntry folder within your 3di installation folder.

2. Pre-entry forms generated from the “system” Routes which come with the 3di.

3. Pre-entry forms generated from any “custom” Routes you have created within the 3di.

Creating a pre-entry form from any Route

All the Route dropdowns in the 3di list both the system Routes and your custom Routes, and for any of the Routes you can generate a pre-entry form tailored to any particular child. Here’s the procedure:

1. Go to the Case Manager.

2. Select the child from the Find dropdown.

3. Make your choice from the system and custom Routes offered by the Question by question dropdown in the lower‑right section of the Case Manager.

4. Click the Pre-entry Form button. You will be prompted to say whether or not you want to include guidance notes for the parents – the last paragraph on the next page explains how you prepare those notes.

5. When the form opens (it can take a noticeable time), use the radio buttons at the top-right to choose the format of the final document: rtf = Word format pdf = Acrobat format xls = Excel format The different formats lend themselves to different particular purposes: you may need to experiment.

6. Click the Export Form button. The form will be saved to the child’s document folder, and also displayed on the screen in the chosen format.

Improving a pre-entry form

Although an automatically generated pre-entry form can be used as it stands, there are several things you may sometimes want to do, including the following:

• Add a preamble to the form, briefing the parents on what to do.

• Add a header and/or footer – with page numbers, for example.

• Condense or otherwise adjust the layout.

• For at least some RepeatingAnswer questions:

  • Create more room for responses by inserting new lines.

  • Copy and paste the answer framework so that several sets of responses can be recorded without the parents needing to use the reverse of the sheet or extra sheets.

• Edit the content for a “special case” child - anything from adding notes to removing or rewording some items.

• Convert the form into a generic pre-entry form – a form for any child. This is particularly worthwhile if you routinely make several changes to the automatically generated form.

Making a generic pre-entry form

The previous steps describe how to make a pre-entry form for a particular child, and will include text tailored to the child's name. You may want to make a 'generic' form that can be used for any child.

• If you plan to create several different forms, it’s a good idea to create a Backend for that and other adventurous purposes; you might call it WorkBench.

• In the Case Manager create a child with a Forenow (the familiar version of the forename) which is unlikely to appear as a word or part-word anywhere else in the interview text – actually, 'Forenow' might be a good choice! Later, when you open your generic form in Word, you can do a find and replace to substitute the name of any actual child: your generic form can be tailored in seconds.

  • To do a find and replace in Word, use the shortcut: <Ctrl + H>

• You’ll realise that if you aim for a generic form which can be tailored to any given child, you will actually need two forms – one where you make the child a boy in the Case Manager, the other where you change the child to a girl and repeat the exercise; that way one form will have male pronouns, the other female pronouns.

• Open an interview with your “generic” child, and for any question on the Route for which you would like any kind of explanatory or other text to appear on the interview form as part of that question, use the AddNote system to enter that text. It will be reproduced at the bottom of the “answer space” for the question in the generated pre-entry form.

Transcribing from a pre-entry form

Having opened the child’s interview in the 3di, open the Route Explorer (click the road-map icon on the 3di toolbar), and select the required route from the Choose route dropdown. You will be taken to the first unanswered question on the route.

Then move along the route by whichever of these methods seems convenient:

• click the toolbar button bearing a right-pointing arrow (it’s to the right of the Route Explorer button)

• or enter <Ctrl + Shift + D> (keep the Shift and Ctrl keys down and repeatedly tap <D> to skip through several questions)

• or click the next highlighted question

Provided pre-entry forms

The provided pre-entry forms are named to reflect their Routes.

ADHD_behaviour_school_nameless_unisex_yymmdd

Completed by the parents or carers.

CCC_named_boy_yymmdd and CCC_named_girl_yymmdd

Children’s Communication Checklist (Dorothy Bishop, 1998, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry)

Completed by the parents or carers and also by the school.

Choose the form for the child’s gender and do a find and replace to substitute your child’s forename for the boy Ziggy or the girl Capucine.

The CCC is described in the second reference Tab of your training course manual (the reference Tabs are indicated on the manual’s front cover by a grey shading), and also in the CCC table interpretation document in the Reference folder within your 3di installation folder.

Although given to both parents and school, the 3di accommodates only one set of CCC responses: the parents’ responses should be used unless there is reason to believe that their responses are heavily biased.

Scoring the school responses to the CCC can be achieved in either of two ways:

1. You can create a second “dummy” interview with the child and complete in that interview just the CCC questions as rated by the school. You then generate a full Report from that interview, and pay heed only to the CCC table within it. If the child is called Sam Bloggs, you might call the child created in the Case Manager for the dummy interview Sam Bloggs_CCC_School. This naming strategy makes it easier to find the dummy interview when you are choosing Sam Bloggs from the Find: dropdown at the top of the Case Manager (because Bloggs_CCC_School will appear immediately below Bloggs) – and you get a reminder that there is such an interview!

2. Dorothy Bishop’s Excel scoring spreadsheet for the Children's Communication Checklist is included in the Tools folder within your 3di installation folder. Probably the spreadsheet is useful only if you have many CCC forms to process as a batch: the responses for each child occupy a single row (with the columns captioned by abbreviated questions), and you must enter numerical codes for the outcomes. Moreover, the spreadsheet declines to give scores for any CCC subscale (there are nine in all) for which under 80% of the items have been answered, whereas the 3di pro-rates subscale scores from the answered questions, reports the number of unanswered questions, and leaves you to decide what validity should be attached to the results.

Converting multi-line option sets to a more compact format

To make your pre-entry forms more compact you can convert multi-line option sets to continuous text. Try this out by creating a pre-entry form for the Route ASD_brief and then using Word’s Find and Replace dialog in Word (shortcut <Ctrl + H>) with the three pairs of text below: copy the first in a pair to the Find box and the second to the Replace box. Make sure you end each copy immediately after the last visible character.

The below templates make use of the fact that ^p signifies 'paragraph break' in Word.

If the text you have selected appears to include a “space” (actually a newline character) at the end, holding down <Shift> and tapping <🡨> will drop that “space” – assuming you made your original selection by dragging from left to right.

Find:

[.....] often^p^p[.....] rarely^p^p[.....] never

Replace:

^poften / rarely / never

Find:

[.....] no, does not apply^p^p[.....] applies somewhat^p^p[.....] definitely applies^p^p[.....] unable to judge (not applicable)

Replace:

^pno, does not apply / applies somewhat / definitely applies / unable to judge (not applicable)

Find:

[.....] definitely^p^p[.....] possibly^p^p[.....] no

Replace:

^pdefinitely / possibly / no

Once you’ve tried the process for converting multi-line options sets to continuous text you’ll be able to follow this brief account of how you could do the same thing for any option set:

To create the Find string:

1. Copy and paste the multi-line version from any automatically generated PreEntry form which uses that option set.

2. Modify the pasted copy by replacing each newline character (it’s the last on each line) with ^p^p. Your several lines will progressively collapse into a single “paragraph”. It helps to tick Show all formatting marks via File → Options → Display – that way you’ll see exactly what you’re working with, including newline characters (¶) and spaces (·).

To build the Replace string:

1. Add a blank line after your edited Find string and then begin with the characters ^p (look at the provided Replace strings if you’re unsure how this should look).

2. Then copy from the Find string the text of each response option in turn and paste it onto the end of the Replace string you are building, adding after each (except the last) something like “ / ” (that’s two spaces, a forward slash, and two more spaces).