Revision as of 19:08, 21 November 2017

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Hint: You can create more sophisticated assessments and reports using the Expression Manager. It lets you access all variable types and easily generate tailored reports at any point in the survey (not only at the end). Using the new Equation question type, LimeSurvey can automatically save your assessment calculations and/or report to the database.

Introduction

LimeSurvey contains a feature that allows survey administrators to create survey "assessments" for his or her respondents - even for multilingual surveys. Assessments are rules which evaluate the responses to a survey immediately after it is submitted, displaying text blocks to the survey participant (based on that evaluation).

In order to use LimeSurvey's assessment feature, access the survey menu and click on the Assessments tab:

Once there, enable the assessment mode:

To be able to create and edit assessments in the older versions of LimeSurvey (e.g., 2.x), visit the survey settings and enable the assessments mode from the Notification & data management tab. Once done, additional fields where you can introduce an assessment value will show up when editing answers.

How do assessments work

Let's construct a simple example that can help you better understand the way in which the assessments mode is supposed to work.

Imagine you have two questions in your survey, the first question asks if the user smokes: "Do you smoke?". The question has 3 possible answers, "Yes, more than 10 per day" with a value of "10", "Yes, but less than 10 per day" with a value of "5" and "No, I don't smoke at all" with an assessment value of "1".

The second question "Do you exercise?" has three possible answers; "Yes, I exercise for at least half an hour three times a week" with a value of "1", "Yes, I exercise every now and then" with a value of "5" and "No, I don't ever do any exercise" with an answer code/value of "10".

If we were to add the totals of the values for each possible answer at the end of the survey, we'd get a good indication of the general health of the respondent. Someone who smokes and doesn't ever do any exercises will have scored 10 in each of their answers, giving a sum of 20 when we add the values together. Someone who doesn't smoke and exercises regularly would have scored 1 in each of the answers with a total of 2 when we add the values together.

A sample survey demonstrating the use of assessments is available for download. You can import this survey into your own LimeSurvey installation via the import function: File:Limesurvey sample survey Assessment.lss.

Assessments

Once enabled, the following page will load up:

To start creating new assessments rules complete the fields located below the Assessment rules table. The following options are available:

Scope: You can choose either Total or Group. The first will create an assessment based on the sum of all the submitted answers in the entire survey. The latter will create an assessment based on the sum of all the submitted answers from a question group;
Group: If you have previously selected Group as the scope of your assessment, the dropdown list allows you to choose the question group you wish to assess.

If you selected Total before, then the Group field will not influence the assessment of the survey answers.

Minimum: The minimum "sum" of answers to which this assessment will apply.
Maximum: The maximum "sum" of answers to which this assessment will apply;

Let's take again the example presented above. If a respondent scored between 1 (minimum) and 10 (maximum), then the assessment feature would display a message telling the respondent that he or she has a good health condition. If he or she scored between 11 (minimum) and 20 (maximum), then the assessment feature would display on the last page a message related to the not-so-good health condition of the respondent.

Heading: The heading of the assessment which will be displayed if the assessment is going to be displayed;
Message: The actual message for this assessment. Inside the message you can use the tags {PERC} or {TOTAL} to show the related score in that particular message. Click on the green pencil button to access the HTML-editor and enhance the final message of the assessment by adding colours, tables, images, and so on.

You can create as many assessments as you like, and you can create more than one assessment to display for a given score.

After adding some assessments, the possible assessments actions will be displayed under the Actions column in the Assessments rules table. From there, you can either edit or delete an assessment rule:

It is important to note that if you use assessments, you must ensure that you have not chosen to autoload the URL at the end of the survey because, if you use an all-in-one survey format, the assessments are displayed on the last page of the final "completed" page after submitting a survey. To check whether the autoload URL function is enabled or not, access the survey menu and then the Presentation tab.

How question types are evaluated

There are certain question types which will not be assessed or will be assessed in a special way. Some of the questions cannot be used with the assessment feautre. However, they can be replaced with assessable question types. For example, a 5 point choice can always be replaced with a simple list (radio) question type.

The following question types can always be assessed:

Array (Flexible labels) dual scale
Array (Flexible labels)
Array (Flexible labels) by column
List (Flexible labels) (Dropdown)
List (Flexible labels) (Radio)
List (Dropdown)
List (Radio)
List with comment
Multiple options
Multiple options with comments

The following list contains question types that cannot be assessed:

5 point choice
Array (5 point choice)
Array (10 point choice)
Array (Increase, Same, Decrease)
Array (Multi flexible) (Text)
Array (Yes/No/Uncertain)
Array (Multi Flexible) (Numbers)
Boilerplate question
Date
Gender
Huge free text
Language switch
Long free text
Multiple numerical input
Numerical input
Ranking
Short free text
Yes/No

Set assessment values for each answer/label

If enabled, the assessment mode will add an additional field between the answer code and answer option name for all the assessable questions:

You can also use label sets as answers for your set of questions. Just lick on the Predefined label sets... button located under the answers matrix and select the predefined label set.

If you decide to use label sets, assessment values can be added to all your labels from the moment in which they were firstly created. This allows the survey administrator to quickly use assessed label sets as answers for multiple sets of questions.

This process is less time-consuming and more practical. You can create a plan in the early stages of your survey in order to use only one set of label sets with predefined assessment values for multiple questions. In this way, you will not have to manually add assessment values to each set of answers for each assessable question from your survey.

To find out more about the label sets and their usage, read the following wiki section.

Assessment placeholders

When using assessments the following placeholders are available:

{PERC}: It displays the score of the current group. It can be used only in the message field of the assessment rule!
{TOTAL}: It displays the total score. It can be used only in the message field of the assessment rule!
{ASSESSMENT_CURRENT_TOTAL}: This placeholder can be used within a survey to display the current total score. Keep in mind that the score is only updated when the respondent clicks on the "Next" button. Therefore, it is useless in an all-in-one survey. Also, note that at least one assessment rule for the placeholder to work.

Tips & tricks

If you only want to use the {ASSESSMENT_CURRENT_TOTAL} placeholder within a survey without showing an assessment message at the end of the survey:

Access the survey texts panel and type in an URL fields and
Enable the autoload URL located in the Presentation panel.

How to disable the assessments mode

To deactivate it, go to the survey menu and look for the Data management tab. Click on it and the Notification and data management panel will be displayed. Look for the Enable assessment mode option and click on it to have it disabled for the respective survey.

Examples

How to use the assessments mode

Let's recreate the example presented above in order to better understand the steps you have to pursue in order to correctly use the assessment values.

[[Note|If you are unsure how to create a survey, use the following quick start guide.

1) Create the survey

2) Activate the assessments. Go to the settings menu of the survey and click on the Assessments tab. Once there, activate the feature:

3) Create a question group and start adding the questions. Your survey structure should look like this:

Attention : Do not forget to check the questions that are assessable! Otherwise, no assessment value field will be displayed in the edit answer options panel.

4) Add the answers to each of the two questions created above. While adding/editing the answers, complete also the assessment value field for each answer:

5) Now that you know the assessment values, access the Assessments panel and start adding assessment rules. Two rules will be shown in the below example:

The message of the first assessment (You should start exercising!) will be displayed if the respondent scores between 1 and 10 points. The message of the second assessment (Well, that's what I call being healthy!) will be shown if the respondent scores between 11 and 21 points.

6) Now, preview the survey and see if the assessment mode is active. At the end of the survey you should get a score based on your answers:

How to use the assessment placeholders

As mentioned in the following section, three assessment-related placeholders can be used: {PERC}, {TOTAL}, and {ASSESSMENT_CURRENT_TOTAL}^{(Obsolete since 3)}.

In the previous example, the following result was obtained: Well, that's what I call being healthy!. However, no score was displayed.

There are many ways through which you can have it displayed. You can either create 6 assessment rules in order to emphasize each possible score/result or use assessment placeholders.

Go to the Assessment rules panel and edit the existing two rules. Go to the Message box and introduce {TOTAL} in a standardized example:

[[File:]]

Now, a respondent will see the following message on the last page of the survey: