Queries and What They Are Asking

Part of Research Assistant (ASSIST) Training: Copying Without Introducing an Error.

About 1 minutes. Free, in your language, no account needed.

A query is a question about the data

After data is entered, checks run on it. Some are automatic — a value out of range, a date before the visit, a missing field. Some come from a monitor comparing the entry to the source.

A query arrives as a question, and it needs an answer that resolves it.

Answer the question that was asked

The commonest failure is repeating the original entry. "Please confirm weight of 45 kg" answered with "weight is 45 kg" resolves nothing, and the query comes back.

A resolving answer says what you checked and what you found. "Checked against clinic note dated 3 March: weight is 145 kg, entry corrected — transcription error." Now the reader knows what happened and why.

Do not change data to make a query go away

If the source says 45 and the query asks you to confirm it, confirm it. An unusual value that is genuinely what was measured stays as it is, with a note explaining if you know why.

Changing a correct value because someone questioned it is worse than the original query. It puts something in the record that did not happen.

Slow queries are a real cost

Unanswered queries hold up the whole study, and they become much harder to answer as time passes, because the people who remember the visit forget it.

If you cannot answer one because you need someone else, say so rather than leaving it open and silent. A query blocked on a person is manageable; a query nobody has looked at is not.