Compose the Questionnaire

For the questions from the list of questions to be displayed in the online questionnaire, you have to Compose Questionnaire. In doing so, the building blocks are distributed across the pages of the online questionnaire and, if required, filters are set.

A new questionnaire is created with the button Create new Questionnaire. Later, you can edit this questionnaire by clicking the description of the questionnaire or the symbol.

The questionnaire serves to arrange the various building blocks (questions, texts, images, etc.) in the online questionnaire. While the list of questions should be organized by content, the questionnaire is structured according to methodological considerations. In the questionnaire, you determine, among other things:

• the order of the questions in the online questionnaire
• the distribution of the questions across several pages of the online questionnaire
• the order of questions within a questionnaire page
• the arrangement of the building blocks on a page (Advanced Display Options)
• the questionnaire logic (e.g. filter questions)

A questionnaire can contain all questions of the list of questions, but does not have to. Questions that are not displayed in the questionnaire can, of course, not be answered by a participant.

Note: Under Compose Questionnaire → Manage Questionnaires, you can create several questionnaires in one survey project. This is useful if you want to display the list of questions (or a large part of it) in different variations – for example, for different target groups or for the randomization of the question order. If, on the other hand, you need different questionnaires with different questions, create another survey project in your My Account.

If there are several questionnaires, a specific one can be selected via the link to the questionnaire (e.g. to welcome the employees of company A with a different layout than the employees of company B). The ID of the questionnaire is selected via the variable q in the URL (URL to the Questionnaire). You can also implement a Random Selection for Questionnaires.

In the tab Settings, you can make many detailed settings for the questionnaire.

The ID should be kept short – it only becomes relevant if you use several questionnaires in the project. The same applies to the Description: It only serves to distinguish different questionnaire versions.

By default, the Layout used is the one defined as default under Questionnaire Layout. If you want to use a different one for the questionnaire, you can select it. If no layout has been activated in the questionnaire layouts yet, no further layouts are available for selection in the questionnaire.

The Access Restrictions allow you to restrict the participants of the survey (Access Restrictions).

The actual composition of the questionnaire takes place in the tab Questionnaire Pages. On the right, all elements are available that you have created in the List of Questions and under Text Elements and Labels. Images that you have uploaded under Images and Media Files can also be inserted directly here.

A new questionnaire initially contains one empty page. With the mouse, you can now simply drag elements from the right into the page on the left.

The Last Page is an exception: No questions or other content can be inserted here. The participant's answers are always sent to the server (i.e. saved) when they click “Next”. After the last “Next”, the last page appears. It does not contain a “Next” button itself and therefore cannot contain any questions.

You get further pages by dragging the blank page at the top right (New page) to the pages on the left or by using one of the symbols to the right of it. These symbols mean (from top to bottom): Insert a new page before the current one, after the current one, at the end. You can also add an ID and/or a Comment to each page. The ID is required to jump directly to a page with the command goToPage() – but more on this below.

Every change to the questionnaire is saved immediately (while the changes are being transferred, yellow dots flash; afterwards, a small green OK appears). With the two arrow buttons, you can start the questionnaire directly from the current page.

To test the whole questionnaire, you can either start on page 1 or start in the overview under Compose Questionnaire.

Questions, text elements, images, HTML code and PHP code (see below) are elements on a page in the questionnaire.

All elements have a title bar. By this bar, you can move them (both within the page and to other pages) or delete them by dragging them out of the page to the left or right.

Some of these elements allow further settings. If, for example, you want to attach two questions directly to each other without spacing, the upper question must not leave any spacing at the bottom and the lower one must not display a title.

You can make these settings by clicking a questionnaire element.

With the options Show question text and Show explanation, the actual question and a possibly stored explanation of the question can be hidden. This is useful, e.g., if two questions shall be displayed directly below each other or if the items of a question are distributed across several pages – but the explanation shall only be displayed once.

The Question number is above all an interesting setting if you have switched off the automatic numbering in the settings of the questionnaire. But you can also use this option to deactivate the numbering for individual questions.

The option Show items is interesting. In rare cases, you might want to display only the question without items – much more often, however, you do not want to show all items, but only some of them. For example, if you want to distribute a question across several pages or insert subheadings between the items via HTML. Which items shall be shown is defined by their IDs. A list “1,2,3,4,5”, for example, shows the first 5 items of a question.

The Spacing to the next question controls how much space remains below the question before the next question follows. This option is particularly relevant if you want to combine questions one below the other.

Above the questions, there is the questionnaire element HTML-Code. It allows you to include short text or HTML snippets directly in the questionnaire. For example, a subheading or some JavaScript.

For formatting texts with HTML, see Texts in the Questionnaire.

Longer texts, however, should be created as a text element (under Text Elements and Labels).

Important: If you edit text elements or questions in a new browser window, they do not appear in the selection on the right at first. For this, the page for composing the questionnaire must be reloaded first.

The most flexible building block in a questionnaire is PHP code (see also Introduction to PHP). It allows full-fledged programming – e.g. filters, automatic item selection, random numbers, etc. (see Filters and Conditional Questions).

By the way, questionnaire elements can be converted into PHP code very easily: To do so, drag a PHP code element into the page. Then drag elements from the page or from the selection on the right into the PHP code element.

Note: It is not possible to convert the PHP code back into questionnaire elements.

Note: In order not to endanger the security of the server, SoSci Survey only allows secure PHP functions in the PHP code. If you use a “forbidden” function such as mysql_query() – which could be used to read the data of other projects – a warning appears and the PHP code is not executed.