Key Considerations
- Question items must have a response domain.
- The question text should contain any important context.
A question item contains a single question along with the response domain answer and any instructions.
The question item is comprised of several elements:
- Label: The name of the question item (e.g. 'qi_A3').
- Instruction: Instruction that was given for the question (e.g. 'If none, write 00 in the boxes')
- Literal: The question text (e.g. 'Do you have a favourite fruit?')
- Response Domains: The opportunities provided to the respondent to answer (e.g.*1 Yes, *2 No)
To build a question item you must first create the answer, known in archivist as the response domain. In the case of Example 1, it requires the creation of a code list and in Example 2, it requires the creation of a Numeric Answer.
Response domains are not limited to one per question, as some questions may offer the choice of how to answer with multiple response domains (for example having both a code list and a numeric answer response; or a code list with a Generic Response)
Example 1 Questionnaire: ALSPAC All Around Me
Questionnaire layout:
Archivist view (alspac_03_aam):
Example 2 Questionnaire: ALSPAC My Teeth
Questionnaire layout:
Archivist view (alspac_99_mt):
Example 3 Questionnaire: NCDS Parental interview form
Questionnaire layout:
Archivist view (ncds_74_pq):
The question literal itself must contain any important context for answering the question, particularly relating to the who, when and where.
In Example 3 above, the important context is the study child (who) and evenings (when).
In some cases, additional text not contained in the question needs to be concatenated to the question literal in order to provide essential context. For instance, a statement before a question may contain important context. Rather than add as a statement in Archivist, this text is concatenated to the following question literal. In Example 4 below the statement before question 22 contains essential information about the time period (when) covered by the question.
Example 4 Questionnaire: WHII - Health Survey 12
Questionnaire layout:
Archivist view (whii_15_hs):
In this example “Have you recently... ” is added to the beginning of the question literal to include the important context of the time period.
An exception to this rule, is when the text that provides the context is entirely contained within another question item, which the question is dependent upon. This often happen when the text is in a condition based on the first question. If you look at Example 5, the question asks “Did you knock any teeth out?” and then the next question asks “How many did you knock out?” which is inside a condition of “If yes”. The second question lacks context, but as it is within a question which contains the context, this is acceptable. Adding text to the second question would violate the Prinicple of not improving the questionnaire.
Example 5 Questionnaire: ALSPAC Teeth and Things
Questionnaire layout:
Sub-questions
If presented with a sub-question situation (see Example 6) then you must concatenate the question literal to produce the most concise method of documenting the question and provide the essential contextual information. The question literal should be made up of the common text for all questions followed by the sub-question text.
You can see from Example 6, the question literal here is, "How would you assess the health of your child nowadays?" and concatenate texts "in the past month" and "in the past year", to produce the two separate question items. The response domain will be the four categories you can select in how to answer "1 - very healthy; 2- healthy, but a few minor problems; 3 sometimes quite ill; 4 almost always unwell". The categories in the response domain have a numerical value linked to each, indicating a code list, and therefore the literal text be recognized as a question item. This flags up an important principle, not be seduced by the presentation of the question, but how you interpret the information presented following our entry guidelines, as Example 6 could wrongfully be misinterpreted as a grid (lacks 25 word count, etc).
In Archivist we have replicated question A1, with two question items, labelled "qi_A1_i", and "qi_A1_ii".
The alternative to a question item is a Question Grids, which is used to enter more complex question situations. See Questions for information about how to decide between a Question Item and a Question Grid.
Example 6 Questionnaire: ALSPAC My Son / Daughter's Health & Behaviour
Questionnaire layout:
Archivist view (alspac_94_msdhab):
You can see from Example 6, that in Archivist we have replicated question A1, with two question items, labelled "qi_A1_i", and "qi_A1_ii". The key difference between "qi_A1_i", and "qi_A1_ii", is the duration of the question, "in the past month" and "in the past year."
The alternative to a question item is a Question Grids, which is used to enter more complex question situations. See Questions for information about how to decide between a Question Item and a Question Grid.
No question text
There are occasions when a question only contains a code list with no question text. In these circumstances the category text is repeated to create a question literal. To indicate that these are options we use a / in between. See example 8 below. This only works when there are a couple of categories which are usually short. In cases where there are several long categories this approach may not be suitable, and so the question number is used as the question literal instead.
Example 7 Questionnaire ALSPAC My World
Questionnaire layout:
Archivist view (alspac_00_mw):
Reusing question items
When constructing the layout of a questionnaire in Archivist, question items are attached to question constructs. Generally both question constructs and question items are unique with unique labels. However, if a question is asked more than once in a questionnaire, with the identical question literal and identical answer, then a question item may be reused when creating question constructs. The question construct labels must always be unique however, as they represent the positioning of the identical questions in the questionnaire. In Example 6 the exact same question with the exact same answer is asked twice in the questionnaire:
Example 8 Questionnaire: SWS Initial
Questionnaire layout:
(Taken from page 1)
(Taken from page 19)
Archivist Build / Constructs (SWS_1_bio):
Archivist view (sws_1_bio):
