Question Responses

Monday, February 2nd, 2009 | Interviewing, Scripting

When we create questions using the Interview Object Model ( IOM ) some questions require us to have responses that the respondent can select. This article will cover the basic structure required to construct a response list.

When we need to create a response list we need to use the following structure,

[Response Name] "[ResponseText]" [SpecialResponse],

First we have the “Response Name” this is a single word that represents the response text, if your response text does not have any spaces in it then you can just have the response name for example ,

{
Nothing "Nothing"
};

could be written as

{
Nothing
};

It should be noted that response names:

Must start with a letter
They may only contain Numbers, Letters or the Underscore character

Next we have the “Response Text“, this is the Full text that the respondent sees on the screen. It can be any character, but must be enclosed in speech marks. If there is more than one response then each response, apart from the last must be followed by a comma for example,

{
WentShoping "Went Shopping",
Nothing
};

Once we have our response texts we may want to turn some of them it into a special responses. Special responses are response texts that have special meanings and behave in a special way. To read more about “Special Responses” click here