Branching to Specific Question Sets Using Question Copies

Often surveys contain questions that are the same for all respondents along with questions specific to the type of respondent. For example, in an employee survey you might want to have some common demographic questions (Division, Department, Time in position) along with some specific questions for each type of employee, (Management, Technical, Classified). You might also want to have the demographic questions worded differently but asking for the same data. This can be done using copies of the questi on.

Remember that question copies all point to the same field in the database so even though the questions may be worded differently, the data all goes into the same field.

Branching exercise:

Start a new project named Copyex. On the first screen put the question

Q1. Select your position classification.

A. Management

B. Technical

C. Classified

Note: Q1, Q2, Q3, etc, are the field names.

For each response set a skip to the appropriate set of questions. Make up a response set for each question, e.g. Divisions might be R&D, Marketing, Sales, etc. Time might be Less than one year, 1 – 3 years, 4-6 years, etc.

Management:

Q2 What is your Division?

Q3 Management: How long have you managed your Division?

Q4 How many employees do you manage?

Technical

Q2 (copy) What Division do you support?

Q3 (copy) Technical: How long have you supported that Division?

Q5 How many problems do you handle in a typical week?

Classified

Q2 (copy) To what division are you assigned?

Q3 (copy): How long have you been assigned to that Division?

Q6 How helpful is your supervisor?

By using copies, the Division and Time data fields would contain the data for all three types of positions and thus only three fields would be necessary to collect the data instead of nine. The above example would produce a database with only 6 fields. Cloning the questions would produce a database with 10 fields. Queries would be used to separate the data into Management, Technical, and Classified.