One questionnaire vs multiple

Question

Hi,

I want your practical advice. I have a long questionnaire which if I combined in one survey it will take about 400 questions. But each respondent will answer a fraction of those questions based on certain randomization and blocking.

Form the practical point of view, is it better to put all these questions in ONe survey/questionnaire on to divide them into several questionnaires/folders then randomly linking the respondents to their assigned portions?

will it be troublesome to like 18 sub-questionnaires to the main questionnaire with using linking survey functionality?

Thanks

Comments

There's no right or wrong answer to either option here.

In my opinion, I like to keep the questionnaire content together in one survey.

The linking only adds additional programming to your workload, like passing out an ID and setting up links at termination questions. You may also need to branch back to the main survey and ensure you are skipping back to the correct point (you can use a "skipto" feature here within the url if need be).

Separating the questions into different surveys will also mean you have multiple admin modules. If you want to run data checks, cross tabs, etc. with questions from different surveys, you can't do it unless you are passing data from one survey to another. That's more work right there!

Just because you have a lot of questions doesn't mean you need to separate them.

I would certainly encourage the question numbers to be labelled / numbered in a neat and orderly fashion so that they make sense as to the section they belong to. This should assist with your programming.

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Hi Paul,

thank you very much for the advice and explanation. I was feeling that one survey is better than multiple because of the increasing programming load you mentioned.

I will probably be using one survey as it is less workload and keeps all my information in one place for any checkups or analysis

Regards'

Answer 1

I have to agree with the one survey approach for reasons already specified.

Be sure to split sections up with question numbering as follows ...

Section A: A1, A2, A3 ...

Section B: B1, B2, B3 ...

and so on ...

This approach means you have no issues with branching to other surveys and passing variables in and out.

And less work with admin modules, etc.

Comments

Thank you very much for the advice, and that is what I currently doing