double answers from which question?

Question

Dear SoSci Survey members,

This case could be a special case so I try to find any solution here.
I settled one question (let's say question A) into two tasks (task I and task II) incidentally, though I should use two different questions (A and B) in each task so that I get each answer in each task separately. Now I got only one answer from each participant in question A and I do not know from which task the answers are coming. Task I or task II? Is there any rule in which the former task's answers will be overwritten by the latter? If I cannot know it, I cannot use the data as the right answers from the participants. It would be a big loss.

Thank you in advance.

Best regards

Answer 1

Option A

If you are using the same question multiple times in your questionnaire (is that what you mean), then the response from the first time is display when the question is shown again. And if the respondent changes the response, it is updates in the database.

Therefore, a question should not be displayed (!) multiple times within a questionnaire.

Option B

If you are talking about an experimental design (randomization), then it can be perfectly okay to display the same question in different contexts.

In that case it is important to do the randomization right. How did you "incidentally" assign the task to the respondent?

Comments

My case was Option A. Thank you for the clear answer. The thing is, the sentences of questions that I set in one survey multiple times were identical and only the description before the questions were different. I understand your answer. However, as I found that the responses were strange (the task was "choose 1 or 2" and the same number of participants chose each of these. Such a thing has never occurred in the other tasks) so I will not to use the responses.