Interviewers and respondents can use the Back or Go To button to return to an earlier question in the interview. They can view the answer or change it. If no answers are changed during snapback, any quota tests remain valid. However, if an answer is changed and the interviewer or respondent uses the Forward or Go To button to skip forward in the interview, any quotas tests in the skipped portion of the script are redone. This might result in a different set of cells being pended or a different set of questions being asked.

When quotas are based on a multiple-choice response list, respondents might contribute towards more than one quota cell. However, if a cell is already full, the quota control system ignores the respondent’s answer for that cell and increments the pend counts for the others answers chosen. For example, in a brand awareness survey, if the respondent mentions Alpine, Kentish Farm, and Dairy Fresh and the quota for Kentish Farm has already been filled, the respondent is added into only the Alpine and Dairy Fresh quotas.

If there are later questions based on the brands known, the respondent is asked those questions for all the questions that they mentioned (that is, for Alpine, Kentish Farm, and Dairy Fresh) even though they did not contribute to the quota for Dairy Fresh. If it is important in your survey that respondents answer questions only for the quotas to which they contribute, you must write a dummy question or create a temporary variable that keeps track of the cells that are pended for the respondent and use that question as the filter for the additional questions. rather than the question that respondent actually answered. For examples of this type of filtering, see Pending one cell only using prioritization and Pending one cell only using prioritization.