Tutorial - Design

Creating an Internet Survey    (Continued)

Here are examples of the objects that can be used in an internet survey.

Radio Vx -or- Radio (parameters) Vx

The Radio command will create a radio button for each value label. It is most appropriate when there are a small number of choices. The first form of the command will create all the radio button in a single column. The second form of the command will allow you to specify various display parameters. The parameters are:

     V H      vertical or horizontal
     1 2       one or two columns of radio buttons (applies to vertical format only)
     A E      label all points or label only the end points
     Y N      show numeric codes (yes or no)

Parameters may be any combination in any order (upper or lower case).  Here's an example of a vertical, two-column set of radio buttons.

Radio (V2) Age

When your survey has a series of Likert scale or semantic differential scale items, a horizontal radio button format can be specified. Change the default script so the items to be grouped together are specified as a range on a single script line instead of each on their own script line. The second form of the command will allow you to specify various display parameters. The parameters are:

     L R      radio buttons to left or right of text
     A E      label all points or label only the end points
     Y N      show numeric codes (yes or no)

Radio (REY) Q5a - Q5f

The dropdown menu is used when there are a large number of possible categories for the respondent to choose from. The most common example of this is when asking for a country or state. The first form of the command will create a dropdown menu where only one line shows until the menu is selected by the user. In the second form of the command, you can specify the number of value labels to display before the dropdown occurs. Y is the number of lines you want to display before the user selects the menu. If y equals the number of value labels, then all the value labels will be shown all the time.

A TextBox is used when requesting that the user type something rather than choose from a menu of items. The default script will use a textbox if there are no value labels for a variable and the variable has a field width greater than 1. When the field width for a variable is a long alpha field (greater than A60), the textbox will have multiple lines and a scroll bar. If you want to force a long alpha field to use a single line TextBox, then use the command format of: TextBox (1) Vx
The parameters for the textbox are:

     L C       left justify or center the TextBox in the frame
     n          number of lines to show in the TextBox (1 to 5)
     P N      progress bar or no progress bar (multiple line TextBox only)

The following TextBox was centered, shows five lines, and show no progress bar as the respondent is typing:

TextBox (C5N) Q7

More that one TextBox can be inserted into a single frame by specifying a variable range. Fields with less than 40 characters will shown as a single line TextBox and longer fields will be shown as a multiple line text box with a scroll bar. In te seconf form of the command, parameters are used to control the number of lines in each TextBox and the location of the text.

     L R T B         set the text to the left, right, top, or bottom of the TextBox
     n                  number of lines to show in the TextBox (1 to 5)

For example, in the following command, parameters were used to set the text to the right and to create single-line TextBoxes:

Question=Please rank each of the following by typing a 1 for the most important, 2 for the second most important, and so on.
TextBox (R1) Taste - Package

The CheckBox is used for multiple response. When creating internet surveys with multiple response variables, the codebook will have the same number of variables as there are value labels. The first form of the command will create all the CheckBoxes in a single column. The second form of the command will create two columns of CheckBoxes.

CheckBox Hear_1 - Hear_4

The ListBox may be used as an alternative to radio buttons. Functionally, the ListBox is identical to the radio buttons.

 ListBox Race

Contents