Creating a “Total Awareness” question

Surveys and market research questionnaires often ask respondents to name any items (for example, brands of a product) that they can remember, and then look at a list of items and say which ones they recognize from the list. The first question is known as a spontaneous awareness question and the second is known as a prompted awareness question.

It is often useful to create a “total awareness” question that combines the responses to the two questions for use during analysis. This can be used both in the questionnaire (for example, to ask a further set of questions for each brand that the respondent is aware of) and during analysis of the results.

As the spontaneous awareness question is intended to find out what the respondent remembers without seeing the list of responses, this type of question is most suitable for questionnaires in an output format such as telephone interviewing or computer assisted personal interviewing, where the respondent is asked the question by an interviewer, rather than for a self-administered web interview.

The following example sets up a total awareness question based on the responses given to a spontaneous awareness and a prompted awareness question. It then adds a further set of questions in a loop, using the responses in the total awareness question to determine how many times to ask the questions in the loop.

▪single response questions and multiple response questions. See Creating single response questions and Creating multiple response questions.

▪a script that defines the content of the total awareness question. For more information on adding scripts to questionnaires, see Adding scripts.

▪loops based on the responses in a multiple response question. See Creating loops to ask the same questions for different subjects.

▪substitution text in the text of the questions in the loop. See Substituting text in a question.

1 Create a multiple response question (press Ctrl+F2), and then change the name to Spontaneous. In the description field, enter Please list the types of coffee that you buy. Leave the response list blank.

2 Create a second multiple response question called Prompted. Enter the question text: Which of the coffees on this list have you ever purchased? Leave the response list blank.

3 Create a third multiple response question called TotalAwareness. This question will not be displayed to respondents, so select Hide Question in the Properties pane. You do not need to add any text for this question, but you can use the question text to add a description of the question. Leave the response list blank.

Another method of creating a question that is not displayed to respondents is to add the question in the Questions pane, instead of the Routings pane. For more information, see The Routings pane and the Questions pane.

4 Create a shared list (press Ctrl+F11) and name it CoffeeList. Enter a list of coffee types:

6 In the Properties pane for the Prompted question, select Not Chosen from the Filter list, and select Spontaneous from At list. This means that any responses selected in the spontaneous question will not be shown again when this question is asked.

1 After the TotalAwareness question, insert a script item: on the Insert menu, click Routing Item > Script Item, and then call it SetTotalAwareness.

2 In the Enter Script Here field, type this script to define the content of the total awareness question:

The next stage is to add some questions that will be asked in a loop, once for each response in the TotalAwareness question.

1 After the final item in the Routings pane add a single response question (press Ctrl+F1) and name it Frequency. Leave the question text blank for now, and add the responses:

2 Add a single response question called Cost. Leave the question text blank for now, and add the responses:

5 In the Design pane for the loop, click the Iterator tab at the bottom of the pane, and then click Responses to a previous categorical question. Select TotalAwareness from the list, and select Selected responses.

The text inside the braces substitutes the relevant response each time the BuyingHabits loop is asked.

8 Now select the Cost question, and then enter the following text in the description field, exactly as shown:

The first question contains all the responses in the shared list; the second question omits any responses that you select in the first question. The total awareness question does not appear. The two questions in the loop appear once for each response in the total awareness question (that is, each response selected in either of the first two questions) and the question text changes each time the question is asked to include the appropriate response text.