Many questionnaires have a set of questions that have identical or very similar response lists. A typical example is a brand awareness study, where you have a list of key brands that you want to ask about. You might ask respondents which brands they can name, then ask which brands they use, and then ask which brands they have seen advertised recently.

When a response list is common to a number of questions, the most efficient way of setting it up is to make it a shared list. This means that you only have to type the full set of responses once, and makes it easier to manipulate the responses in the list at various points in the questionnaire. For example, in the brand awareness study, you might want to remind respondents of any brands that they did not mention spontaneously and ask whether they recognize the names. Since each respondent will mention different brands spontaneously, you will want to specifically mention different brands for each person.

Shared lists in interview scripts are not concerned with setting up a coding frame for responses that are common to a number of lists. UNICOM Intelligence data analysis is based more on response names and native values rather than response codes, and as long as a response has the same name wherever it is defined, you can treat all occurrences of that response as if they were a single response. For example, if the respondent chooses strawberry yogurt from the list of Alpine flavors and from the list of Dairy Fresh flavors, you can usually treat these choices as a simple reference to strawberry yogurt for analysis purposes.

This section describes the following keywords for the metadata section of the interview script:

Avoid using the same name between shared lists and their contained responses. For example, when a shared list contains a response named Drink, use a shared list name like DrinkList to avoid conflicts.