Hiding interview-only elements

From time to time there will be responses that you need to include in a script for interviewing purposes that you do not want in analyses. The hidden “No answer” response that is required when you set MustAnswer to False so that respondents can skip questions is a typical candidate for suppression in analyses. To suppress interviewing elements you must create an axis block in the question that specifies the elements you want in analyses. In the axis block, there are three methods of hiding elements:

▪List the interviewing elements you want to include by name, and exclude the ones you do not want to see.

▪Use the “..” notation to include blocks of interview elements. List the unwanted elements separately, preceding their names with ^.

Here are examples of these methods. They all have MustAnswer set to False so that respondents can skip the question, and they all produce the same output in analyses.

This example simply omits “Not answered” from the axis block.

Mstat "Are you ..." categorical [1..1]
{
Single, Married,
Cohabit "Living with partner",
Divorced, Widowed,
MstatNA "Not answered" na
}
axis (
"{
..Widowed
}"
);

This example uses the ^ notation to hide “Not answered”. You can use this method to hide elements that are in the middle of the list too. Just follow the ^ element with another list of elements you want to include.

Mstat "Are you ..." categorical [1..1]
{
Single, Married,
Cohabit "Living with partner",
Divorced, Widowed,
MstatNA "Not answered" na
}
axis (
"{
..,
^MstatNA
}"
);

This example sets the element’s IsHidden property to True. This is a good method to use if you also want to exclude the element from the base count.

Mstat "Are you ..." categorical [1..1]
{
Single, Married,
Cohabit "Living with partner",
Divorced, Widowed,
MstatNA "Not answered" na
}
axis (
"{
..,
MstatNA [IsHidden=True]
}"
);