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Basics of Building in SMART-TRIAL

No matter which of the five SMART-TRIAL products you select, all studies are created and built the same way using the three-step guide that is illustrated in the picture below.

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Before being able to follow this three-step-guide, you will have to create your study. A study in SMART-TRIAL is any data collection activity you are going to perform. Find a step-by-step guide on how to create a study in SMART-TRIAL by reading the "Create and Edit Study" article. 

When you have created a study, the first step to get started is to create your forms. In the forms, you define what data you want to collect in the form of questions you create. Every single variable you want to collect needs to be created as a question in a form. After creating the desired number of forms, the second step is to create your process. 

You can think of the process as the timeline of your study and on the timeline, you place some data events which are a point in time where you collect data from someone. Usually, studies have one process because most subjects go through the same flow. But some studies do have multiple processes. You attach the created forms to the different data events in your process.

The last step is to create sites. Sites are used to recruit subjects and it is an abstract concept since you can use sites in a way that makes the most sense for your study. It can be a country if you are doing a country-wide study but it does not need to be a physical location in the real world. Sites are a way to group subjects together and to control who has access to them and their data.