Randomising two questionnaires in a survey

Question

My survey includes several questionnaires (such as sociodemography, subjective well-being, and two main questionnaires), and I want to randomize the order of the two main questionnaires for different participants, as well as randomize the questions within each. I'm having difficulty figuring out how to do this on the site.

Comments

Why do you want to rotate the questions? And why the questionnaire? Known the goal is important for a helpful answer :)

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The two main questionnaires in our survey consists the same items, but each has different questions. The reason for randomizing the order of these two qnrs is to prevent any potential bias from answering one before the other, as this may affect the results. The other questionnaires in our survey do not need to be randomized. (or rotating?)

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Thank you for clarifying the first rotation. What about the other one:

> as well as randomize the questions within each

And did you create the questionnaire in separate questionnaires ("compose questionnaire") within the same project or did you put all questions into one questionnaire?

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Yes, the items in both of the main questionnaire I mentioned need to be randomised.

I put all the parts into one questionnaire.

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> Yes, the items in both of the main questionnaire I mentioned need to be randomised.

Please give me more details. What are the "items" you're talking about? How many questions, how many items, texts eventually? And why do you want them to rotate? I ask because question- or item-rotation may cause unwanted unexplained variance in the data, and I guess you have a good reason for the rotation. However, I need to know how many pages the questionnaires have and what questions/items, because it may interfere with the rotation of the questionnaire order.

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Thanks for explaining that. I believe this is a common procedure in designing questionnaires for psychology studies, as far as I know. There are approximately 95 questions (one question per page), with 70 of them related to the two main questionnaires—35 questions for each. And yes, they are all text-based. We need to rotate these two questionnaires and also randomize the items within each for participants.

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Okay, we're getting closer, thank you. It's important to know, that we're talking about 95 separate items/questions and not about 4 questions with items, each.

> There are approximately 95 questions (one question per page)

Did you actually create 95 pages (I hope not) or did you work with loopPage()? Did you create 95 questions or one question wiht 95 items (which would be much easier to handle)? The information is important because loopPage() and setPageOrder() must not be combined.

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I haven't yet proceeded with creating the pages, but the 95 questions need to be shown, each on its own page. Should I create a separate page for each of them? Unfortunately, I’m not familiar with loopPage.

To summarize the structure of the survey: the first two sections contain information and the consent letter, which I have placed on separate pages. Then, participants will see a description of the two main questionnaires. Afterward, they should be directed to one of the main questionnaires (randomized for each participant) to answer 35 items, presented in a random order. Following the completion of the first main questionnaire, they will proceed to the other main questionnaire.

After the main questionnaires, they will respond to additional questions, which I can manage myself.

Answer 1

Should I create a separate page for each of them? Unfortunately, I’m not familiar with loopPage.

You should make yourself familiar with that useful function. Learning it will be much faster than creating 95 pages ;)

Option A

As it definitely makes sense to work with loopPage() in your case, you should not use setPageOrder() to rotate the order of the two parts. Instead create your questionnaire with one page for the first part (using loopPage() to show it on multiple pages) and another page for the second part.

When everything works fine, make a copy of the questionnaire within your survey project, switch the two pages, and follow this manual to randomly assign the respondents to one of the two questionnaires.

Option B

You did not yet specify if you created the questions as separate questions or as items of a question. If the former is true, you can create two random generators for the rotation (see Rotate Questions), and a third one for the order. And then you can assemble a list of all 50 questions in random order. It might look like this:

$questionsA = valueList('RG01', null, 'label');
$questionsB = valueList('RG02', null, 'label');

if (value('RG03') == 1) {
    $allQuestions = array_merge($questionsA, $questionsB);
} lese {
    $allQuestions = array_merge($questionsB, $questionsA);
}

$question = loopPage($allQuestions);
question($question);