Auto-populating a response in a side by side question | XM Community
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Question

Auto-populating a response in a side by side question

  • April 7, 2021
  • 2 replies
  • 92 views
RaymondBurr

Hi Qualtrics Community - can anyone help me to improve the participant experience of a survey I'm designing? I've got a side-by-side question that asks participants to estimate the time (in hours and minutes separately) they spent on seven different types of compliance activities (see image below). To enter the hours and minutes, participants can select from a drop-down that also has "Not applicable" as a response option for instances where the participant didn't engage in that compliance activity.
The experience I want to create is: when a participant selects "Not applicable" in either the hours or minutes drops down, then "Not applicable" is automatically populated into the corresponding hour or minutes drop down.
This would save the participant having to select "Not applicable" in both the hours drop down and the minutes drop down. Does anyone have suggestions for how this can be done? I'm a newbie to Qualtrics and not at all experienced with JavaScript coding, so if you have a suggestion, please be very detailed about what needs to be done. Many thanks!

Hours and minutes drop-down.JPG

    2 replies

    ashleigh_quaill
    Level 3 ●●●
    Forum|alt.badge.img+19

    Not a simple solution that does exactly what you want, but I have a couple of suggestions that might help without needing to get too complicated!
    Option 1 - Split into two questions
    This would mean one multiple choice question saying "which of these activities did you complete?". You can then use Carry Forward to only display those lines in the side-by-side for hours/minutes. This means if they didn't complete one of the activities, they won't be asked for time used.
    Option 2 - Request response (or disable force response)
    I am assuming you are expecting that all respondents will answer all fields (either with a number or Not applicable). You can turn on Force Response that will make the respondent answer all questions, or you can use Request Response instead if you want to encourage completion of most fields. This simply adds a pop up for the respondent that says "You have not answered ___ questions" (with the number of Request Response questions that are not fully completed). It does mean that technically someone could submit without entering the information you want but might improve the user experience in completing the survey (which I know you're trying to preserve by preventing the repeated "Not Applicable" selection)

    RaymondBurr
    • RaymondBurr
    • Author
    • April 8, 2021

    Thanks of those suggestions Ashley. As you say - neither of them quite does what I want.
    As an aside, I have tried your first suggestion but due to comparability concerns with a earlier survey I haven't been able to implement that.

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