When you have quotas for multiple choice responses, the quota control system normally terminates an interview only if the targets for all of the chosen responses have been met. Otherwise, it pends the cells for the responses whose targets have not been met and returns the names of those cells in the WasPendedList property. The pend result flags will be a collection of values that reflects the actions taken.

For example, if the respondent has used brands A, B, and C and the target for brand B has been met, the cells for brands A and B will be pended and the interview will continue. Quota cells A and C will be named in WasPendedList, and the quota flags for the interview will be qrWasPended, qrOverTarget, and qrBelowTarget.

You can change this behavior by assigning a priority value to each quota so that cells are pended in a certain order, or you can set up least-full quota-ing that always pends the cells that are currently the least full. For more information about the methods of prioritization, see Quota prioritization for multiple response categorical questions.

If you use one of the standard prioritization methods, there is generally nothing that you need to do in the questionnaire script except pend the quota cells at the appropriate point in the interview. However, you must set some variables in the project’s quota database to specify which type of prioritization you want to use (see “QUOTA_Matrix table” in the UNICOM Intelligence Developer Documentation Library for details). The topics listed below provide some examples of how you can use quota prioritization in your scripts. Unless otherwise stated, all examples work equally well with all prioritization methods.