When you write a categorical response list, you give each response in the list a unique name which you normally use as the response text as well. As long as the response names are unique within the question, it does not matter to the interviewing program or the case data file whether the response texts are unique or not. This is important only for respondents so that they can differentiate one response from another.

You can create questions whose response lists have one or more responses in common. For example, in a survey about eating out, you may want to use the same restaurant name or type of food in more than one response list. Perhaps you will have a question that asks respondents which types of restaurants they go to when they eat out, and another question that asks which types of food they cook when they entertain friends at home. The response names in each list are identical but, because they appear in different questions, the interviewing program is able to differentiate between them by inserting the question name in front of each response name. So, if Indian food appears in the response lists for the EatOut and EatIn questions, the interviewing program treats the response names as EatOut.Indian and EatIn.Indian.

This process of inserting the question name at the start of a response name is called namespacing, and the response name that it creates is called the Fullname.

As long as the duplicate response names appear in different questions, you do not normally need to bother about namespacing when working in the metadata section because it happens automatically. The exception is when you have a single question with a response list that needs to have responses with identical names. The example below illustrates a typical scenario.

In this example, each subsection contains the same programs, so you want to use the same response name for each one. If you are using UNICOM Intelligence Professional and you save the interview script as it is shown here, it will be saved as an .ivs file but not as an .mdd file because of the duplicate response names. What makes the programs unique is the fact that they appear under different subheadings. So, you need to specify that the response names should be namespaced using the subheading names. This will generate fullnames for the programs such as TVSat.HellsKitchen, VideoDVD.HellsKitchen, Internet.HellsKitchen, and so on. To do this, place the namespace keyword at the end of each subsection definition, as follows: