You’ve completed the build and test phases of your survey and have stakeholder approval. Now, it is time to add any of the necessary logic to your survey.
Survey logic changes the flow of your survey and has two basic goals.
- To eliminate survey bias by protecting against unqualified and duplicate survey takers. (Discussed in our recent blog post: Using Logic To Eliminate Online Survey Bias)
- To fight fatigue by routing survey takers to the smallest set of questions possible.
Today, we are going to talk about fatigue-fighting logic.
Page Jumping Logic – Page Jumping is a form of skip logic that allows for respondents to jump to a specific page based on previous answers.
- Page jumping logic ensures that the survey taker is never asked a question that is not relevant to them.
- It is used to dynamically control the flow of the survey as the survey taker responds to questions.
- To set this type of logic up, the survey designer creates rules and sets a jump destination that will fire when those rule conditions are met.
Show Hide Logic – Show Hide logic allows you to show or hide a question based on the answers to a previous question. This means you can show or hide certain questions that may or may not pertain to respondents.
- Questions or pages can be conditionally shown based on the logic rules that the survey builder sets up.
Piping/Looping – Piping or looping is the ability to repeat previously-collected data later in the survey.
- Many surveys have sections that require repetition of a question or response based on answers to previous questions in the survey. One way to do this is to create separate questions for each option. Piping or looping is an alternative that can save a lot of time and effort.
- Piping allows you to take the answers from one question and dynamically populate the answers of another question.
- Looping allows you to repeat pages or questions multiple times based on the answer to a multiple-choice question answered earlier in the survey.
Percent Branches – If you have a large enough population and you can afford to sample more than a small group of individuals, percent branches offer a unique way to reduce the size of your survey for each respondent and reduce potential fatigue.
- With percent branching, you identify a group of questions for each branch. Then you can specify what percentage of the time each branch is shown. This technique is particularly useful if you have a large set of questions that covers a lot of subject matter but you do not necessarily need to ask the same questions of every individual taking the survey.
These different forms of survey logic can not only control the flow of the survey, but can also reduce survey fatigue.