How can you distinguish between 'no response' and 'not applicable' on slider scale? | Experience Community
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How can you distinguish between 'no response' and 'not applicable' on slider scale?

  • July 12, 2022
  • 4 replies
  • 254 views

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Hi,
In short, I need to be able to distinguish 'not applicable' from 'no response' on a slider scale. This is the same question posted by cjenkins but the responses don't seem to answer it.
Of note, I have already collected my data so cannot change the way the questions were formatted.
I have a slider where participants rate the importance of a variable from 0-100, or they could check a 'Not applicable' box (which I renamed 'Unable to respond'). If they opted not to move the slider, this was taken to mean 0 (i.e. the variable is of 0 importance out of 100).
The study team realised we needed to distinguish between someone intentionally not moving the slider (i.e. leaving it on 0 saying the variable isn't important) from people who just skipped the question. As such, at the end of each question we had a checkbox saying: "When we analyse the survey results, we will need to be able to distinguish between missing data or 'unable to respond' and risk factors that have been marked as 0/100 in terms of importance. All of these are indicated by a ‘0’. To support our interpretation of the results, please select 'Yes' to confirm that you understand that if you mark a risk factor as zero on importance, it will be interpreted as 'Not important' unless you have checked 'Unable to respond'."
However, when I download the data I see that 'Not Applicable/Unable to Respond' is treated as a blank cell, as are any sliders which have not been moved from the default of 0. I need to be able to distinguish between people saying 0 importance vs those who said 'Unable to Respond'. Is there a way to download the 'Unable to Respond' results so I can tell these apart (NB: I have renamed to this but it would be called 'Not Applicable' in Qualtrics).
thanks

4 replies

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  • February 4, 2023

I have the same question!


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Has anyone found a solution for this?


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The default format of slider question doesn’t have any value despite the slider being at the zero-position mark, hence showing up as blank.

Selecting Not Applicable will also show up as blank.

You will need to set the default choice, in order for a value to be show up for individuals that doesn’t move the slider.

Alternatively, you could set the range to be -1 to 100 with the default being -1 (for those that doesn’t move slider) and 0 to be the least importance.

 

However, the method above is only applicable before collection of responses.


vgayraud
QPN Level 8 ●●●●●●●●
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  • QPN Level 8 ●●●●●●●●
  • July 7, 2026

For already collected data, if you check the “Recode seen but unanswered questions as” option in your export data settings, you can specify how missing values should be recoded.

In the example below, seen but not answered will be exported as 999 (OP could put 0 to export them directly as 0s) and NAs will remain blank.