Single-choice responses in a multiple-choice list
If you want to force respondents to answer all applicable questions in an interview, and you have multiple-choice questions where they are asked to choose responses from a list, you can include a response such as “None of these”. For example, if you ask respondents to choose the brand that they use from a list, and their brand is not in the list, they can choose “None of these” to continue with the interview.
To make sue that respondents cannot select this response with any other responses, flag it as a single-choice response by using the exclusive keyword as follows:
<question_name> "<text>" categorical [<number_of_responses>] {
<multiple_choice_responses>,
<single-choice_response> exclusive
};
For example:
RestaurantType "When you go out for a meal, what types
of restaurant do you normally visit?" categorical [1..]
{
Indian, Chinese,
Oriental "Other Oriental",
Italian, French,
European "Other European",
RestaurantTypeNone "None of these" exclusive
};
The interviewing program displays exclusive responses in a bold font as a signal that they cannot be chosen with other responses.
Exclusive responses can appear anywhere in a response list, and a response list can contain more than one such response. This often happens when a response list contains the special responses for No Answer, Don’t Know, or Refused (see
Special responses). Also, if the response list is sorted in some way, it is common for exclusive responses to be flagged as fixed so that they always appear at the same point in the list, usually the end (see
Responses with fixed positions in the response list).
An alternative to a “None of these” response is an Other Specify response. This allows the respondent to type a text response that can be coded later on. For more information, see
Other Specify.
See also