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embedded sub-surveys

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11:23
January 4, 2008


Bob

Guest

I’m developing an end-of-course survey in SurveyGizmo with a Pro account. We have many courses; I’d like to make one big survey but show or hide questions based on parameters we pass via the URL (e.g. the course number, the delivery medium, etc).

The one fly in all of this is that I’d like to ask a short group of questions about each instructor, by name–but the number of instructors is variable. The pool of instructors is also large and fluctuates.

If at all possible, I’d like the survey to be one page.

I’ve set up a sample survey so that it has questions for X number of instructors, and I pass the names via the URL (instructor 1, instructor 2, etc.) and it hides the questions that have no instructors. This works fine for end users, but it is a pain when it comes to reporting because I can’t just run a simple report showing me scores for “Mary Smith” because in a given course she might be instructor 1 or instructor 2 or instructor 3, etc.

So if she is instructor 1 in one class and instructor 2 in another, then respondents’ answers to the prompt “Overall, I would take another class from this instructor” would be in two separate fields, meaning I’d have to aggregate them manually.

So, what I’d like to do is to have two separate surveys–1 course survey and 1 instructor survey. Ideally, they would both appear on the same page to respondents; from their vantage it would appear to be one survey. If there are multiple instructors, I’d like the instructor survey to appear multiple times on the page.

This way, I could easily run a report against the instructor survey database to find out about Mary Smith’s feedback for all the courses she has taught. Assuming the course number got written to both databases, I would essentially be creating a relational database.

I don’t see any way to do this natively with SurveyGizmo. Am I overlooking something? Or, can I achieve the same effect another way? Thanks!

1:18
January 4, 2008


Christian Vanek

Moderator

Cambridge, MA

posts 776

hi Bob,

Actually I think your first idea would work. You would just have to setup an “or” filter.

Filter where instructor 1 = “Mary Smith” OR instructor 2 = “Mary Smith”

(the “or” operator is above the filters.)

Would that work?

Cheers,

-Christian

2:02
January 4, 2008


Bob

Guest

Kind of–the problem is that I can’t aggregate the results within SurveyGizmo.

The way I’ve set up the survey, there is a matrix for instructor 1, a matrix for instructor 2, etc. So if Mary Smith is instructor 1 in one class, and instructor 2 in another, from the survey’s standpoint those are two entirely different questions/matrices. I can’t run a single report that asks “How did Mary Smith score on the prompt ‘this instructor was easy to understand’?” because there are multiple instances of that prompt in the database.

The best I can do is to find out how Mary Smith scored on that question when she was instructor 1, how she scored on that question when she was instructor 2, etc. Then I’d have to aggregate the data manually.

Does that make sense? I feel like it is hard to explain.

4:23
January 8, 2008


Scott McDaniel

Admin

posts 46

Hi Bob,

I’ll jump in and try to help. Sorry for the delay getting to this ticket.

The solution might lie in Piping. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that feature, but the basic idea is that you would ask out of a list of instructors which one was the 1st, the 2nd etc. Then the rating questions would be “Piped” or repeated for each value.

If you’re interesting in having us take a look and come up with a strategy for your survey design we do now have a Professional Services Team that can provide that service for a fee, just send an inquiry here http://www.surveygizmo.com/import-consulting-services/

Thanks
Scott

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