Editing Questions

NOTE: Survey Question Hierarchy

Surveys have a hierarchy of elements. You can just plunge ahead and stick questions at the lowest level of the hierarchy, but eventually you'll want to do things that require you to better understand the elements.

You can see the hierarchy when you are in the question editor

Survey

The overall container

Question Group

A group of pages and questions that can be administered to a specific sub-audience of the survey population, based on metadata. This feature was developed to support matrix surveys.

Page

A screen full of material presented to the respondent all at once. Pages help the respondent focus their attention. Pages can have names to provide more context. Pages will become important for question branching (branches can only happen when the page changes)

Question

A collection of one or more Response Elements. The Response Elements can be respondable (e.g., a radio button) or non-respondable (a block of text, an image). Questions can stand alone (have one response element) or be used to group several related Response Elements together, typically for later ease of authoring or sharing. To facilitate sharing of questions among authors, Questions can have metadata assigned to them, and are (anticipated 5/10/08) to be the smallest unit of search.

Response Element

This is the smallest unit. It can be a group of radio buttons, a block of text, or other "atoms" of a question. It can not have metadata. At present (5/10/08) there is no mechanism to promote a Response Element to Question status by copy as a Response Element and paste as a Question.

For all practical purposes, any given survey can have unlimited numbers of question groups, pages, questions, and question elements.

Create a New Survey

If you are creating a new survey from scratch, use the New button on the Survey List screen. Options are:

Create a Blank Survey

This option creates an empty survey into which you can write or import questions

Create from existing Survey

(not implemented)

Create from existing Template

(not implemented)