Single and multiple response questions (also known as categorical questions) have a predefined set of answers from which choices can be made. Build provides separate options for creating single response and multiple response questions, and you must choose the one that matches the types of responses you want to allow.

You can filter the response list so that, when interviews take place, only responses that were or were not mentioned at a previous question are displayed. This is particularly useful for spontaneous and prompted awareness questions where you want to prompt only for the responses that were not mentioned spontaneously.

In a multiple response question, you can flag some of the responses as single response – for example, if there is a “None of the above” response.

If the response list contains an ‘Other’ response, respondents can also give answers that are not in the predefined list.

You can associate pictures with responses. These can be in any of the following formats: gif, jpg, jpeg, png, or bmp.

When you export categorical questions, the export process exports the question and response texts exactly as they appear in the questionnaire. Sometimes you will want to use different texts in your analyses than you used during interviewing. A typical example is question text, where you will tend to use a more wordy approach in interviewing than in analyses, saying, for example, “What is your overall opinion of the product?” rather than simply “Overall opinion”.

Categorical responses are exported as numeric codes, where codes are assigned to responses in the order they appear in the questionnaire. The first response is code 1, the second is code 2, and so on. Numbering is sequential and starts at 1 for each question.

Select the Advanced tab, and then set these properties:

Choose whether or not this question must be answered.

If a question may be left unanswered, and you do not insert a No Answer response in the category list, Build inserts one automatically. This is because the interview script that is generated from the Build questionnaire requires this in order for respondents to be able to click Next without having to select an answer. (You will not see the No Answer category until your screen is refreshed, for example, when you change tabs. At this point, Build also displays a message telling you that it has added No Answer.)

If you set this option to Yes and then edit the question later on and change this option to No, Build does not automatically remove No Answer. If you want to disallow No Answer response, you must delete it yourself.

Choose No if the question should be displayed to the respondent. If this is a dummy question that is to exist in the questionnaire but not be displayed to respondents, choose Yes. (Typically, the responses to hidden questions are set by statements defined in IOM Script items. They provide an efficient method of merging the responses to a number of related questions into a single variable for use elsewhere in the questionnaire. For this reason, the response list for the hidden question often consists of all the responses to the questions that are to be merged.)

Choose whether this is a single or multiple response question. By default, the setting for this property matches the data type of the item you selected to create this question: that is, if you chose Single Response then Single Response will be selected automatically for this property. You should only need to change this setting if you want to change the question type after the question has been defined. Changing the question type here changes the overall question type in the questionnaire and also changes all the individual response types in the response list.

Choose the order in which responses should be presented. Choose Default to present responses in the order they appear in the response list, Random to present responses in a random order, Rotated to present responses in rotation so that each response takes a turn at being first in the list, or Reversed to present responses in reverse order so that the last response in the list appears first.

Use the Display Responses boxes if you want to filter the response list based on the respondent’s answers to previous related questions.

In the first box, choose one of All Responses, Chosen, or Not Chosen.

In the second box, choose the question whose answer controls the responses to be displayed for the current question.

When prompted, confirm that the responses defined for the chosen question (the parent question) may overwrite the response list for the current question.

In the Responses section, in the Type column, choose one of Single Response, Multiple Response, Don’t Know, No Answer, or Refuse to Answer for each response.

If a response is to be treated as a Specified Other response, click its Other check box. During interviews, respondents can select this response to give an answer that does not appear in the category list.

To define routing for a response, select the routing destination from the GoTo dropdown list for that response. (If you want to skip forwards in the questionnaire, you must define the question you want to route to before you can select it from the dropdown list.)

To associate a picture with a response, do the following:

You can add new responses to the list, delete responses, or alter the order of responses in the list using the options above the response list. For more information, see Editing response and subject lists.