Better Surveys with Multi-select Response Piping

Pete Jentzen, Inquisite Support Engineer

At least daily the Support Team is called upon to assist an Inquisite survey administrator with recycling a survey design from last month, last quarter, or last year – copied, renamed, and modified for today's deployment. This fast and effective method promotes a uniform presentation of a proven survey's framework. Unfortunately, it can also impress déjà vu upon your respondents!

Save Time, Increase Response Rate

Inquisite Survey 9 introduces Multi-select Response Piping (M-sRP), a tool that simultaneously offers a personalized survey experience while promoting the time-saving benefit of recycling a reliable survey .IQS file. With such a versatile tool available, it can be beneficial to design a new survey campaign incorporating M-sRP, considering that its attractive facility for repetition eases the burden on administrators and can coincidentally increase response rates in repetitive surveys.

How & Why

Essentially, M-sRP captures the answer selections from certain question types and pipes them into a subsequent question or table. The obvious purpose is to narrow down a general subject until the respondent has identified with the survey's prime goal, as shown in the figure to the right. Both Ranking questions and Choose Many questions typically include lists of choices, and narrowing these options can be excellent ways to eliminate irrelevant issues, data, and areas of disinterest for your respondents. The resulting choices would filter down to your target question(s) directly.

The LINK Button

"Link" is a button that you may have noticed when setting question properties in release 9.0. Have you ever selected it and seen an error message, or possibly a choice of questions that appear earlier in the survey? M-sRP has a purpose here, and you can experiment with its abilities by choosing a Ranking or Choose-Many question from a previous page in your survey.

The option to link source and target questions is outlined here:

Your Admin Website > Help > Online Manual > "What's New in Inquisite Survey System 9?" > Multi-select Response Piping > "Read more..."

From One, Many

M-sRP encourages you to build many target questions from a single source question. For example, if you asked a respondent to choose-many from a "utilized item" selection (Source) for satisfaction data (Target Q1), then later choose from a selection of reasons based on a ranking of importance (Target Q2), and later still to ask for their related comments (Target Q3) – all could come from the same source question, as shown in this figure.

A Better Design

Multi-select Response Piping is a useful tool to the survey designer and extends a more humanizing survey experience for your respondents. You can minimize the time spent deploying repetitive surveys by utilizing Multi-select Response Piping; combined with a Prepopulation Data Import file, it is liberating for the repetitive-survey administrator. Survey design utilizing M-sRP can allow your entire survey to be easily replicated later by allowing prepopulation to fill text entries unique to the current deployment, whether it is single tags or multiple answer selection lists. By directly acknowledging earlier selections with follow-up questions, you can offer each member of your targeted audience a personalized survey experience; each person that accepts your survey invitation can feel that their voice is being heard. This paves the way for willing acceptance of your future survey endeavors.