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Questions in Archivist is where the question text is entered and and brought together with the relevant Response Domains. They can be Question Items or Question Grids. The response Response domain(s) and/or Code List(s) must be created before you can build a question, hence why this is not the first step in the process. Interviewer Instructions are attached to the question during the creation of the questionsalso created during this process.
Before creating a question, you will need to consider whether the question is a Question Item question item or a Question Gridquestion grid. It is not always easy to identify what is one question item, multiple question items or a sequence with multiple question items.
A question item Question Item is a representation of a single question in a questionnaire (made up of the question literal, label, response domain and optional instruction).
A question grid Question Grid is a matrix of questions with overarching question text that all share the same possible answers.
When to use a Question Item
Question Items items are the default choice when entering a question most of the time. They must always include at least one response domain and question literal that should be able to stand alone contextually. Sometimes nearby text has to be concatentated on to inadequate question text, to display complete context. For example, the sentence 'Smoking:' on its own would not be enough for a complete question text, but 'Tell us about your habits: Smoking:' would be. Example 1 below shows a clear example of this, with 'how often did you see him in hospital' being concatenated on to '1st admission' to form a complete question textSee Question Items for more on concatenation.
However, if text that would provide clarity/context to a question item is contained entirely within a previous question, such as '1. Do you smoke? 2. How many a day?' these have to be documented as two separate question items, to maintain faithfulness to the original questionnaire (Principle 1).
When to use a Question Grid
In general, individual questions are preferable to question grids when documenting questionnaire metadata, due to the simplicity of the former. Question grids become the tool of choice when we are faced with a series of repeating questions such as a food list. A question grid is advantageous to use when:
- There are 3 or more questions, and the length of the question plus the longest sub-question is 15 words or more
- There are 2 questions, and the length of the question plus the longest sub-question is 25 words or more.
. Therefore, when a grid is used in a questionnaire, the questions in the grid are entered as individual question items instead of question grids, unless it is a multi-column grid.
Note that if the sub-questions have varying response domains , or multiple text boxes are required, it is often best practice to use multiple question items, (for example the code list is not the same across the sub-questions) then multiple question items must be used. This is regardless of how many sub-questions/statements there are or how long the question items will be. However, some of these situations can be solved with using break-off techniques in Question GridsThe exception to this is 'breaking off' questions with a mixed response (usually code list plus a text answer) from a group of sub-questions. The sub-questions without a mixed response can be input as a question grid. The mixed response sub-questions are added as separate questions below the grid. See break-off questions for more details.
Example 1 Questionnaire: ALSPAC My Teenage Son
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This example shows a set of related questions displayed as separate question items. Question A4(d) appears at first glance to be one question, but is actually three sub-questions. The overarching text 'How often did you see him while he was in hospital?' is common to all three of these questions, and so is concatenated on to each mention of 'admission'. This particular example also shows a situation that the enterer may assume is to be recorded using a question grid at first, due to the layout.
Questionnaire layout:
Archivist view (alspac_04_mtsd):
Example 2 Questionnaire: My Teenage Son 2004 (ALSPAC) question H17. a-dThis example shows a set of related questions displayed entered as a question grid.
Example 2 Questionnaire: ALSPAC My Teenage Son
Questionnaire layout:
Archivist view (alspac_04_mtsd):
