Question type - List (Dropdown)/en

Short description

This question type collects input from a dropdown menu. You can also create subcategories within this list by using the advanced setting 'Category separator'.

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Download english sample question: W_-_List_Flexible_Labels_Dropdown.csv

Core settings

Mandatory

Description

This option allows the survey administrators to request their respondents to answer certain survey questions. If the mandatory questions are not answered, the respondents will not be able to proceed further. If you have a question with multiple subquestions, and you require only certain subquestions to be answered, use the minimum answer attribute located under the Logic tab.

If you use any of the preinstalled themes and the mandatory question attribute is enabled, a red asterisk will be shown next to the question. If you wish to hide it, please check these instructions.

Available options

• On - Question must be answered before the participant can proceed to the next page - the answer option 'No answer' is never shown.
• Soft - If the question is not answered, a warning is shown when trying to proceed to the next page - however, the participant can choose to ignore the warning and proceed. Note that the 'No answer' option is still shown (if activated in survey presentation settings)
• Off (default) - Question can be left unanswered

Option 'Other' (other)

Description

This option is used by multiple choice-type questions and gives you the ability to ask for a selection that is not part of the enumerated answer list.

Available options

• On
• Off (default)

Condition (previously "Relevance equation")

Description

If the result value of the condition is "1" or "true", the question is "relevant" in the survey context, i.e. it is shown to the survey participant. If not, the question is hidden. Any survey question allows you to specify a relevance equation. This function is the successor of conditions and supports much more complex conditional logic.

Syntax Highlighting

Whenever you save the condition, it is evaluated and syntax-highlighted. Any errors will be color coded so that you can quickly detect and fix them.

 Hint: To check if all conditions are used correctly within your survey, read about our show logic file feature.

Valid values

• Any condition that makes use of the ExpressionScript syntax, without surrounding curly braces.

Examples

Here are good examples of syntax highlighting.

Advanced settings

Random answer order (random_order)

Description

  As of 5.5.0, this attribute is not longer used for ordering answer options. Please see QS:Answer_order

This attribute causes LimeSurvey to ignore the existing order of answer options/subquestions, and instead it orders them randomly. This option permits the survey creator to diminish the survey bias. Please note that if a question has subquestions, the order of subquestions will be randomized, not the order of the answer options.

Available options

• Yes - Randomize when participant enters survey
• No (default)

Randomization group name (random_group)

Description

It places the questions into a specified randomization group, all questions included in the specified group being displayed in a random order to the survey respondents.

You can find a sample survey using randomization group name in ExpressionScript sample survey.

Valid values

Just enter any string you like (for example: 'group1'). All question which have set the same string within the randomization group name box will have their place in the survey randomized (=randomly exchanged among each other).

Preview To preview the questions use the preview survey instead of the preview question group function, as the second has been reported to not show the questions in a randomized order.

Sort answers alphabetically (alphasort)

Description

  This features is deprecated in version 5.5.0.Use QS:Answer_order instead.

If you use a list of radiobuttons or a dropdown list, you can order this list alphabetically by activating this option.

Available options

• On
• Off (default)

Label for 'Other:' option (other_replace_text)

Description

Short text string to replace the text "Other" as label for the "other" option.

Note: You can make use of this attribute if you have previously enabled the "other" option located under the general options tab.

Example

Entering a value of "Alternative:" for this attribute would result in the word "Alternative:" being used instead of "Other".

  It is extremely important to note that this question attribute should only be used in single-language surveys. A translation will be attempted but will only be successful if the translation already exists in the alternate language file (i.e.: translation cannot be made on a survey-by-survey basis). Therefore, to translate your other text, you have to add your other_replace_text to the english .mo file (because this is LimeSurveys baselanguage) and translate this String in each of your surveys languages .mo files.

Hide tip (hide_tip)

Description

Most questions will usually include a tip that says "Please choose one of the following options" or a hint text on how to fill out the question. This attribute allows you to turn off or on this tips/hints.

These tips/hints include validation criteria messages (such as min/max number of answers, min/max/equals sum value). If hide_tip is enabled, these messages will be hidden. However, if the user enters invalid data, the tips will appear. They will be coloured in red, getting changed to green once the validation criteria are met.

Available options

• On - the tips/hints are hidden;
• Off (default).

Category separator (category_separator)

Description

This attibute takes a char that will be considered by LimeSurvey as a category separator in answers.

Example

If you set this to the char ":", and have an answer with the following text "Fruit: orange" and another with "Fruit: apple", then a category of "Fruit" is assumed and will contain 2 items "orange" and "apple". This will be displayed as categories/items in the dropdown list.

Always hide this question (hidden)

Description

If enabled, the question will always be hidden - it will not be displayed to the survey participants. This function can be used in the following scenarios:

• If you wish to prefill a question with a URL and you want not to have it displayed on the screen. This overrides any conditions used within the survey because the respective question will not even be embedded on the page.
• If you wish to store or calculate a value on the fly via the ExpressionScript - Presentation.

Note: A common question type that is used with this function is the Equation one.

Available options

• On
• Off (default)

'Other:' comment mandatory (other_comment_mandatory)

Description

It only applies to mandatory questions having an "other answer" option in which the participant can give a free text response ("other comment").

When this setting is activated and the participant selects the other answer (the "other checkbox" or "other answer in a list"), then he will have to give a comment in the "Other comment" input box in order to proceed to the next page.

Note that this option is not available for Multiple Choice questions because the "Other" checkbox status is not recorded in the database for this question type, only the content being recorded. This means that checking the "other" checkbox is just a visual effect that is only meaningful if the text box is filled in: that is why other_comment_mandatory is assumed to be set for this question type.

Available options

• On
• Off (default)

Example

If activated for a "Multiple options with comments" question and the user enters a value in the left part of the Other answer but doesn't enter text in the Other Comment part, a warning message will be displayed when he tries to proceed to the next page.

SPSS export scale type (scale_export)

Description

This is used for SPSS export only. This attribute overrides the default scale guessed by SPSS. To learn what the different measurement scales do, please read the related SPSS documentation.

Available options

• Default (default)
• Nominal
• Ordinal
• Scale

Show in public statistics (public_statistics)

Description

This attribute allows the survey administrator to chose if a particular question results should be displayed to the survey participants after they submitted the survey.

Note: To have the statistics displayed on the last page, do not forget to enable this functionality from the presentation & navigation settings. Otherwise, no statistics link will be displayed at the end of your survey.

The default setting for each question is 'Off' (=Do not show the question statistics to the respondents). You have to enable this for every single question if you want to show the survey statistics of that (those) particular question(s) to the survey participants after the survey submission.

Available options

• On
• Off (default)

Insert page break in printable view (page_break)

Description

This attribute is only active when you actually print a survey from the Printable View. It forces a page break before the question.

Available options

• On
• Off (default)

Height of dropdown (dropdown_size)

Description

The List dropdown questions types contain the "heigh of dropdown" attribute, which allows you to control how many list items are visible to the respondents without scrolling down or clicking on the dropdown menu.

Valid values

• Any integer value greater than 0
• Note, if you select a number larger than the length of the list, the list will be sized to show all options

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