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Surveys sometime contain "loops," sub-sections of the survey that are repeated several times. This is common in product concept testing and patient case reviews:

## What are survey data loops?

Loops are a sequence of repeated instructions. For example, a survey might ask a physician to answer questions for three patient cases. The survey asks questions for patient case 1, then repeats the same questions for patient case 2, etc.

## Flatten vs stack

Survey data loops can be represented as flatted data or stacked data. Protobi can represent both structures.

**Flattened** data has one row per respondent, and one column per question per loop:

**Stacked** data has one column per question and one row per respondent per loop:

Clients often ask us to stack data with flattened patient cases. [Stacking can be done programmatically in the tool](/process-data/stack-patient-cases). Survey loops are appended vertically--similar to [stacked waves](/process-data/combine-data-using-a-simple-stack) of data. Data for each patient case (B1.1, B1.2, etc.) is put in a single stacked data column (B1).

Below is a PDF with a more detailed discussion...

## Download

[survey-loops-protobi.pdf](/uploads%2Fupload%2Fimage%2F5200%2Fdirect%2F1571169768138-survey-loops-protobi.pdf)

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