Questionnaire Configuration

This page explains the settings related to the configuration of the questionnaire and its questions. As shown before, the following question types are implemented:

Single Choice Question:
Multi Choice Question
Matrix Question
Semantic Differential
Open Question
Text Block (plain text, without any response options for the participant)

Depending on the question type, different configuration options are available.

General Settings

The following configuration settings are available for all question types:

Name: A question name. This name is only used for internal organisation and is not visible to participants.
Blueprint: A question can either be general or related to a Blueprint.

General questions are displayed to all participants, regardless if they successfully donated any data.
Questions related to a Blueprint are only displayed to those participants that successfully uploaded some data to the related file blueprint. This means that if no donated data were extracted by the related Blueprint (either because the extraction failed, was not attempted or all entries were filtered out by the extraction rules), the question will not be displayed.

Consult the section on integrating donated data in the questionnaire for more information.
Page: Number of the page on which the question will be displayed.
Index: Order in which questions on the same page will be displayed.
Variable Name: The variable name associated to a question. This name will be included in the data export. For items belonging to a question, the variable name will be constructed as follows: "question_variable_name-{item-value}".
Text: The question text that is displayed to participants.
Required: If a question is marked as required, the application will show a hint to the participant if they forgot to answer this question. This hint will only be shown once. This means that if a participant chooses to ignore the hint and clicks on 'continue', they are able to skip a required question.
Randomize items: Enable or disable randomization of all items.

Specific Settings

Open Question

Input type: Define whether to apply restrictions for the input to this field. Can be 'text' to allow any kind of text, 'number' to only allow numerical characters, or 'email' to only allow valid email addresses. Default is 'text'.
Maximum input length: Restricts the input to a certain number of characters. If this option is left empty, no input length restriction is enforced.
Display: Define whether to show a 'small' one-line input field or a larger multi-line text-box. Defaults to "small" and only applies when the chosen input type is "Text".
Multi item response: If this is selected, you can define items for each of which the participants will be asked to provide a text input. If not selected, the question will be rendered with just one input field below the question text.

The input type and maximum input length options are only "softly" enforced in the participant’s browser by hinting at and highlighting non-compliant input. This means that these restrictions are not enforced on the server-side if participants choose to ignore the input hint.

Matrix Question

Show scale headings: Option to show/hide scale headings.

Question Items

For Single Choice Questions, Multiple Choice Questions, Matrix Questions and Semantic Differentials, participants answer in relation to question items. To configure question items, the following settings are available:

Index: Defines the order in which the items are displayed.
Label: The label/text of the item that is displayed to participants related to an item. For semantic differential questions, this is the label displayed on the left-hand side of the scale.
Label Right: Only for semantic differential questions. The label displayed on the right-hand side of the scale.
Value: Is (a) the identifier of an item and (b) used to indicate which item(s) has or have been selected in the data export (only for Single and Multi Choice Questions).
Randomize: Instead of randomizing the order of all items with the randomize setting on the question level, this setting allows randomizing only certain items while those for which this option is not ticked stay in their place (i.e., according to their index).
Delete: Check this box to delete the item. It will be deleted when you click Save.

Scale Configuration

For Matrix Questions and Semantic Differentials, participants give their answers (or in other words: rate the question items) with the configured question scale.

Index: Defines the order in which the items are displayed.
Input label: The text that is displayed within the scale-points/input-buttons.
Heading label: The text that is displayed above the scale-points/input-buttons (currently, only possible for Matrix Questions).
Value: Used to indicate which scale point has been selected in the data export.
Secondary point: If a scale point is marked as 'secondary point' it will be rendered differently than the 'regular' scale points. This is useful to, e.g., offer a "Don’t know" option to participants that is visually seperated from the main scale.
Delete: Check this box to delete the scale point. It will be deleted when you click Save.

When you have long labels on Question Items or Scale Points, or you have many scale points, it is a good practice to define optional word-breaks in your labels. To do so, you can use the html code , which will break the word in this position with a hyphen if there is not enough space to render the complete word. E.g., "undecided" will be rendered as "un- decided" if the whole word does not fit on one line.

Filter Configuration

You can conditionally hide questions or items based on answers to previous questions using filter conditions.

Index: Sets the order in which filter conditions are applied.
Combinator: Defines how multiple filter conditions are combined: AND = all conditions must be met, OR = any condition must be met for the filter to be applied (ignored for the first (lowest index) condition, so can be set to any value for the first condition).

Note: Conditions are evaluated as a chain, with AND having higher priority than OR. For example: Condition1 OR Condition2 AND Condition3 OR Condition4 will be evaluated as Condition1 OR (Condition2 AND Condition3) OR Condition4).

Options: AND, OR.
Comparison Question/Item: The question or item whose answer is used in the comparison (the left side of the condition).
Comparison Operator: Specifies how the answer should be compared to the value.

Options: Equal (==), Not Equal (!=), Greater than (>), Smaller than (<), Greater than or equal (>=), Smaller than or equal (⇐), Contains, Does not Contain.
Comparison Value: The value to compare against (the right side of the condition).
Delete: Check this box to remove the condition. It will be deleted when you click Save.

Behavior when all items of a question are filtered out: When all items of a question are filtered out, the entire question will not be displayed. If the filtered question is the only question on a page, the entire page will be skipped and the user will proceed to the next available page.