Suppose you want to recur an answer selected by a participant in a subsequent question, allowing you to include one or more follow-up questions related to this selected answer in the survey. To set this up, you can use a question-placeholder.
When you ask a participant in a single response question about his/her favourite colour from a list of predefined colours, you may also want to know why he/she has a preference for that colour.
You can then, for example, include an open question with a question placeholder in the survey in which the participant can justify his/her choice. When answering the survey, the colour selected by the participant will then be displayed at the position of this placeholder.
In order to include such a placeholder in an open question, proceed as follows:
- Click the link labelled Rich text editor at the top right of the text box to go to the RTE window.
- Click the Placeholder icon (1).
- Click successively on the triangles in front of Questions and Section (2) at the bottom of the RTE window so that all question variables created for the corresponding survey are displayed, see the Placeholder column on the right.
- Specify the position in the text box (3) where the question placeholder should be inserted.
- Click the link – in this example {{q1}} (4) – for this placeholder to be included at the indicated position in the text box.
- Click the Save changes button in the Rich text editor. The question placeholder will be included in the survey.
For more information, please refer to the Rich Text Editor (RTE) article.
In order to retrieve an answer provided by a participant, you can use more or less the same procedure, the only difference being that the question placeholder now looks slightly different.
Instead of a participant having to select his/her favourite colour from a list of predefined colours, you can decide to allow him/her to enter this colour himself/herself. For this, you can also make use of a single response question.
In order to allow a participant to provide his/her own colour, you can leave the corresponding row empty or fill it out with a description such as Other:. In addition, it is a prerequisite that tick marks are placed at Allow text entry and Force response (mandatory question) and that the value None has been selected at ‘Response data type’.
So if you now would like to know why he/she has a preference for that colour, you will have to use a slightly deviating question placeholder containing the attribute _text in an open question. When answering the survey, the colour provided by the participant will then be displayed at the position of this placeholder.
A placeholder like {{q3_1_text}} refers to the text entered by a participant at the first answer option (Value: 1) of the question (here: q3).
In order to include this placeholder, you can apply the procedure described above. And to view this text placeholder, you need to successively click on the triangles in front of Questions, Section and SingleChoice at the bottom of the RTE window.