Shared lists

In many questionnaires you will have a set of questions that have identical or very similar response lists. A typical example is a brand awareness study, where you have a list of key brands that you want to ask about. You may have a question that asks respondents which brands they can name, then another one that asks which brands they use, and one that asks which brands they've seen or heard advertised in recent weeks. An even more general example is a ratings list that you want to apply to a number of questions. In an employee satisfaction survey, you might present employees with various statements about different aspects of their work and ask them to say how much they agree or disagree with the statement using a five point scale.

When a response list is common to a number of questions, the most efficient way of setting it up is to make it a shared list. Not only does it mean that you only have to type the full set of responses once, it also makes it easier to manipulate the responses in the list at various points in the questionnaire. For example, in the brand awareness study, you might want to remind respondents of any brands that they did not mention spontaneously and ask whether they recognize the names. Since each respondent will mention different brands spontaneously, you'll want to specifically mention different brands for each person.

Unlike other scripting languages, shared lists in interview scripts are not concerned with setting up a coding frame for responses that are common to a number of lists. UNICOM Intelligence data analysis is based more on response names and native values rather than response codes, and as long as a response has the same name wherever it is defined, you will be able to treat all occurrences of that response as if they were a single response. For example, if the respondent chooses strawberry yogurt from the list of Alpine flavors and from the list of Dairy Fresh flavors, you will usually be able to treat these choices as a simple reference to strawberry yogurt for analysis purposes.

This section describes the following keywords for the metadata section of the interview script:

Keyword	Description
define	Create a shared list
namespace	Make 'duplicate' responses unique when using two lists with some responses in common
use	Include one list in another list, or use a shared list as a question’s response list

Note Try to avoid using the same name between shared lists and their contained responses. For example, when a shared list contains a response named Drink, use a shared list name like DrinkList to avoid any potential conflicts.