Respondent tab
Use the Respondent tab to set parameters that will be applied to each interview.
Note The following descriptions of the percentage fields are designed to be read in conjunction with the subsection at the end of this topic entitled "How UNICOM Intelligence Load Tool calculates percentages when tests are running".
% Timed out and restarted interviews
The percentage likelihood that an interview will time out and restart.
% Abandoned interviews
The percentage likelihood that an interview will time out at some point in the script and not be restarted.
% First page abandoned interviews
The percentage likelihood that an interview will time out on the first page and not be restarted.
% Questions incorrectly answered
The percentage likelihood that a question will be answered incorrectly. When a question is incorrectly answered, UNICOM Intelligence Load Tool will request another answer for the question from the Auto Answer player to simulate the respondent correcting his/her answer.
% Next
The percentage likelihood that the respondent clicks Next to move to the next question. The default is 100. Accepting this default assumes that no respondent ever does anything except proceed sequentially through the interview.
% Previous
The percentage likelihood that the respondent clicks Previous to go back to the previous question. The default is 0.
% Stop
The percentage likelihood that the respondent clicks Stop to stop the interview. The default is 0.
% Go to
The percentage likelihood that the respondent clicks Goto to jump to a specific question. The default is 0.
Delay between pages
The range of seconds that you specify here is used to simulate the delay that occurs while the respondent reads the question and selects an answer. The default is 1 to 20 seconds. You can set a fixed delay by specifying the same minimum and maximum values but this will not accurately reflect the way that real interviews work. You can also pause a test while it is running and change this setting. When you restart the test it will use the new delay you have set.
Max attempts
The maximum number of attempts that the Auto Answer player should make to answer a question. The default is ten.
Answer pooling
Select this option if you want to reuse responses selected for the first test interview in subsequent interviews, rather than selecting a different answer each time. You might do this when the loading of the survey is more important than selecting truly random responses.
When you run test interviews, UNICOM Intelligence Load Tool uses the Auto Answer player to select responses at random for the first interview. These responses are then cached and reused for all other interviews in the test. The chosen answers remain in the pool for the lifetime of the test. The only way to reset a test's answer pool is to delete the test or restart UNICOM Intelligence Load Tool. Answer pooling is off by default, and does not work if the "Questions incorrectly answered" setting is nonzero.
Complete interviews
Select this option if you are setting up a test that will run for a fixed amount of time, and you want interviews that are in progress at the end of the test to continue to completion. Normally when a fixed time test ends, any interviews that are in progress time out.
Delay per question
This option is designed for scripts with pages that display more than one question. Select it if you want to apply the delay between pages setting to each question on the page rather than to the whole page itself.
Note The percentages in the Actions and Navigations frames are used in different ways. In the Actions section, each percentage refers to the number of interviews within the total number of interviews run. If you set 10% abandoned, then 10% of the interviews that UNICOM Intelligence Load Tool runs should be abandoned.
In the Navigations section, each percentage is the percentage chance that the particular button will be chosen on any page. So if you have an interview with ten questions and you specify a 10% chance of hitting the Stop button on each page, you would expect that you will hit the Stop button on one of the ten questions, meaning that you will almost always press the Stop button for the interview. Therefore, almost all of your interviews will end up in the Stopped by respondent state.
The "% Questions incorrectly answered" setting is in the Actions section but is calculated per page not per interview.
How UNICOM Intelligence Load Tool calculates percentages when tests are running
UNICOM Intelligence Load Tool calculates the actual percentages for timed out interviews, use of the Next button, and so on, on a per interview basis. It uses the Auto Answer RandomInterview object to set the options and then uses a Page object from RandomInterview to answer the questions on each page.
The Page object can recognize the first page of an interview due to a change in the session token. On the first page of an interview, it calculates whether this interview should time out or be abandoned and, if so, calculates the page on which this should happen. Then, as it handles each page, the Page object checks whether it has processed the required number of pages. If it has, it sets a property to indicate to UNICOM Intelligence Load Tool that the interview should time out or be abandoned.
See also