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WebSurvey@UW - Page Conditions

This document describes page conditions or branching of questions in a survey.

In designing a survey, you may choose to have certain pages of questions display only if certain answers are selected for previous questions. This will allow you to design a survey in which the questions asked are tailored for the respondent, depending on the information he or she has provided in previous questions.

Page conditions are the mechanism by which pages in a multi-page survey are optionally displayed. That is, other than the first page in a survey, each page may be shown or hidden from the respondent based on the page conditions associated with the page. If the page does not contain any page conditions, the page will be shown to all users regardless of how they have answered questions. Page conditions allow a survey creator to include or exclude sections of questions based on responses given on prior pages of the survey so that only relevant questions are displayed.

A page condition can be based on any question on any prior page, not just the previous page. If the conditions on a survey evaluate to “True,” the page is displayed. Similarly, if any of the page condition evaluate to “False,” the page is hidden from the respondent.

Each condition is created by selecting a question from a prior page, selecting an operator, and entering or selecting the value to be compared using the selected operator. A logical operator is a way a statement is evaluated to be either true or false. The appropriate operators and, if applicable, the predefined answers for a question are displayed depending on the type of question selected.

Each page condition must be part of a collection of conditions known as groups. Each page in a survey can use up to five groups. A group is the way “AND” vs. “OR” logic has been implemented in the application. The conditions within a single group are evaluated using “AND” logic, while each group is combined together with other groups using “OR” logic. Thus, a page is displayed if at least one group evaluates to “True” even if all other groups on the page are “False.” A single group evaluates to “True” if all of the individual conditions within that group evaluate to “True.”

To better illustrate how groups work, let’s use an example of a page in a survey that has two groups of page conditions, each of which has two conditions.

The page will be displayed if:

• Both conditions in the first group evaluate to "True" (regardless of how the second group evaluates)

OR

• Both conditions in the second group evaluate to "True" (regardless of how the first group evaluates)

The page will NOT be displayed if:

• Each group has at least one condition that evaluates to "False"
• Thus, in this example, the page will only be displayed for males aged 18-25.

As a second example, imagine a survey which contains five pages. The first page contains a single question which is a dropdown box prompting the user to select his/her gender. If the user selects "Male," the fifth page should be displayed. If the user selects "Female," page two, three, and four (but not five) should be displayed. To implement, page conditions are added to the second, third, fourth, and fifth pages of the survey. Each page has a single page condition, all of which use the question from the first page. On pages two, three, and four, the page condition uses an equal operator, and the value "Female." On the fifth page, the page condition again uses an equal operator, with the value "Male." In the case where "Male" is selected on the first page, the user "skips" from the first page to the fifth page. This type of skip logic is commonly used, and is a good example of how every page in a survey can be optionally displayed to the user.

To correctly set-up a page condition, there must be at least one group of conditions for the specified page (a page may have up to five groups of conditions). In order for a page to be displayed to the respondent, at least one group must evaluate to “True.” In order for a group to evaluate to “True,” all conditions within that group must evaluate to “True.” Conditions linked by “AND” logic should be placed within the same group, and page conditions linked by “OR” logic should be placed in different groups.