Questions and responses

Desktop User Guides > Professional > Interview scripting > Writing interview scripts > Questions and responses

You define all the questions in the questionnaire in the metadata section of the interview script. You can write the metadata for your interview in UNICOM Intelligence Professional, or you can import metadata that has been created with another interview tool, such as Build on the UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Server Admin platform.

The interviewing program recognizes a number of different question and response types. The interview scripting language uses the following keywords to identify these types:

Keyword	Description
booleans	A question requiring a True or False response. See Questions with Yes/No responses.
categorical	A question requiring the respondent to select one or more answers from a list. See Questions with categorical responses.
date	A question requiring a date and/or time as the response. See Questions with date/time responses.
double	A question requiring a numeric response that can contain decimals. See Questions with decimal responses.
long	A question requiring a whole number response. See Questions with integer responses.
text	A question requiring a text response. See Questions with text responses.

This section also covers the following:

▪Non-alphanumeric characters in question and response texts. See Special characters in question and response texts.

▪Using HTML tags in question and response texts. See Using HTML tags in question and response texts.

▪The Ask statement that you use in the routing section to ask the questions you have defined in the metadata section. See Adding questions to the routing section.

▪Keywords for No Answer, Don't Know, Refused to Answer, and Other Specify responses. See Special responses.

▪Allowing respondents not to answer questions

▪Questions with no columns in the case data file

▪Setting default answers

▪Setting initial values