With this post we start a new series called Ask Tech Support, where we go over a question or topic that has come up recently while helping our customers. There is a collective consciousness with SurveyGizmo customers, because a single question seems to arrive all at once from multiple customers, and this becomes perfect content for this segment. There is no regular schedule, but we hope it will encourage continued success with SurveyGizmo and your surveys.

For our first installment we are talking about the ‘other’ option for checkbox and radio button question types.

This option within SurveyGizmo allows the survey respondent to have a write-in option, and specify their own reporting value. However, it is important to note that just like other options within a radio button or checkbox question, the option represents two distinct items: an option label and a reporting value. The option label is what the respondent sees (Turkey, Rice, Other food, etc.) while the reporting value can be completely different and is what is actually saved as the response to the survey. For instance, if they choose ‘Turkey’, the survey could have a reporting value of just ‘T’.

In the case of the ‘other’ checkbox, the label is ‘Other food’ but the reporting value is the respondent’s entry in the open textbox. Therefore, the ‘Other food’ label is never recorded as part of the survey response. The reason this distinction is important is because the label will not be tracked as part of the response, and a question created in this manner will not provide the label as part of the response.

If you wish to have the same effect but allow the label to be correlated to the open textbox, the question type of choice would be the Multiple Text Fields question type:

To see the difference in reporting, the following survey was used to create this sample report, which should help illustrate the results.

If you have any further questions, please use the community forums!

Tags: checkbox, option, other, other option, radio, radio button