When you display responses in rotation, each response takes a turn at being the first response in the list. Once a response has reached the top of the list, it moves to the end of the list the next time the list is displayed. Apart from this, the relative order of responses in the list remains unchanged.

To present responses in rotation, type:

rot is an abbreviation of rotation which you can use if you prefer.

For example, if the question is defined as:

The first time the question is asked, the last response in the list might be displayed first, followed by all other responses in the list in the order in which they appear in that list:

The second time the question is asked, responses are presented in the same order except that the last two response in the original list is first, with the other responses in their original order:

The third time, the response list looks like this:

After a rotation pattern has been set for a question in a particular interview, it does not change, regardless of how many times the question is asked. If the respondent goes back to the question, the responses are in the same order as when the respondent first saw the question. A new rotation pattern is set for that question only when the next interview starts.

The rotation pattern is based on the number of responses in a response list, so if there are several questions with rotated response lists and they all have the same number of responses, the rotation sequence for all of those lists is the same. The interviewing program does not recalculate the rotation pattern for each question. If a script contains two response lists of four responses and two response lists of five responses, the two response lists with four responses use one rotation pattern, while the two response lists containing five responses use another rotation pattern.

The interviewing program generates the rotation patterns for a script when the first interview runs, and the rotation patterns for subsequent interviews run on from there. For example, if the rotation pattern for a question in the first interview is 4, 1, 2, 3, the rotation pattern for that question in the second interview is 1, 2, 3, 4, and in the third interview, it is 2, 3, 4, 1. This applies whether or not the interviews run concurrently. Rotation patterns are based on what is known as a seed value which, for rotation, is calculated as:

To rotate responses using a statement in the routing section, type:

If you specify ordering for a question in both the metadata and the routing section, the routing specification overrides the metadata specification.

For more information about defining order in the routing section, see Controlling response order from the routing section.

Rotation does not apply to responses that have a fixed position in the response list. For more information, see Responses with fixed positions in the response list.