Speaker
Description
Communication materials are essential for engaging panel participants in survey research, but their creation is often time-consuming and resource-intensive—especially in multilingual contexts. Panel studies require both recurring content and wave-specific updates. The complexity increases significantly when surveys are administered in multiple languages.
With PhOrM, we propose a solution to reduce this effort in the long term. Since communication materials can be fully described using metadata—similar to metadata-based survey instrument programming—it becomes possible to automate their creation using reusable text components. We have developed an infrastructure that allows centralized documentation of metadata. Texts are broken down into sentence-level components, tagged, and archived (currently in Excel). Our aim is to deconstruct documents from the past ten years into their smallest components. While layout information is not yet included, all textual content is already covered.
The main advantage lies in the reusability of structured text elements, which significantly reduces time and costs—particularly in translation workflows. In the future, PhOrM will enable automated suggestions and AI-assisted generation of new communication materials. Although currently tailored to our internal needs and not yet DDI-compliant, we plan to expand PhOrM for broader use across different contexts and stakeholders.