How do you split respondents so they see 3 different segments of questions?

Question

Hello,

Essentially I have 3 series of questions I want to ask to 3 different groups of 60 respondents within my quota of 180 total respondents. So each distinct set of questions will be shown to 60 unique respondents. I know the simple programming way would be to setup 3 Sawtooth sites each with it's own set of questions and do it that way, but that would be more difficult to manage after programming.

I tried reading the help center and messing around with the randomize function, however all I end up doing is changing the order of the blocks and every respondent sees all 3 question sets. 60 respondents should see set 1, 60 set 2, and 60 set 3, but all within the same Sawtooth survey.

Is there a way to easily do this? Please help! Thanks!

Comments

"Even Distribution Quota" from the Community Question Library can be used to divide respondents fairly evenly:

https://sawtoothsoftware.com/community-question-library/1808-even-distribution-quota

That should get you fairly close to 60/60/60, but there can be some wavering.

Answer 1

You could do this using a few built in things in Lighthouse Studio.

The first would be to build a quota (call it MyQuota) with three cells and each cell having a limit of 60 respondents.  Rather than logic, you would have each cell set to always qualify and then set the quota to check for cell membership randomly.  This will basically randomly put someone into the cell and stop putting people into a cell once it fills up.

Once we have a 1-3 assignment coming from the quota, we can use the randomized blocks capability in the software.  First, build a list (call it ParentList) that just has 3 items in it.  Next, build a constructed list (call it BlockList) with the instructions like this:

ADD("ParentList",MyQuota)

What will happen is MyQuota will evaluate to a 1-3 value, which will add the corresponding item from the parent list to the constructed list.

Next, set up randomized blocks and then tell the blocks to be controlled by the constructed list.  This way the respondent will only see the one block that is controlled by whichever quota cell they get put in to.

Comments

Thanks Brian. When I set up my randomized blocks, I added my anchors for the 3 question sets, however then I get an error stating "Blocks may not be added when using a constructed list". It may be important to note I am running an older version of Sawtooth (SSI Web 7.0.30) so maybe this functionality is simply unavailable without Lighthouse Studio that both you and Zachary mentioned. I was able to follow your other steps without incident, but got stuck here. Is there a workaround?

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Rick, once you set your randomized set to use your constructed list, the blocks setting should automatically fill with one row for each item of the predefined list (in your case, three rows).  At this point, instead of adding new rows, you can edit the existing rows to select the associated anchor questions.