why tag

Often researchers want to gather text responses about why a question was answered a specific way. In the past, in order to get this additional information, follow up text questions were necessary to find out more about this, often times creating extra code to make this work. The why tag may now be applied directly to the initial question, and can be conditioned so that specific responses will lead to different variations of the why question that is displayed. The why tag accepts a showif conditional decorator that allows the why statement to appear as a follow up question to the initial question; if showif is not included, the why statement will appear at the same time as the initial question.

Try it!

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Syntax

# basic usage
X. A question that requires follow up.
type: radio
1. Option 1
2. Option 2
3. Option 3, etc.
why: Please explain why.                    {showif: condition 1} {required: n}
why: Please explain why you chose this one. {showif: condition 2} {required: n}
why: Add'l. why if needed.                  {showif: condition 3} {required: n}


# NPS example
BRAND. Assigned brand
type: radio
selectby: counts
1. Brand A
2. Brand B
3. Brand C, etc.

new page

NPS. Rate $QBRAND_text:
type: radio
series: 0..10
hscale: y
headings: Very bad, Very good
why: Why did you give $QBRAND_text this rating? {showif: [value]}

Decorators

Examples

Basic

In the following example, the respondent's satisfaction with their current vehicle is measured on a 5 point scale. The scale is treated as "displeased" (1 or 2), "neutral" (3), or "satisfied" (4 or 5). Each of these categories is assigned a different why statement with a showif condition that determines when to display them.

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1. How would you rate your vehicle on a scale of 1 to 5?
type: radio
series: 1..5
hscale: y
headings: Hate It, Love It
why: Why are you satisfied?   {showif: anyChecked($Q1,4,5)} {id: 1_WHY3}
why: Why are you displeased?  {showif: anyChecked($Q1,1,2)} {id: 1_WHY}
why: Why do you feel neutral? {showif: anyChecked($Q1,3)} {id: 1_WHY2}

Specifying why IDs

Since the why tag requires condition logic be specified for it, it is possible to only use why statements for some of the question's options. In this example, the client may only care whether respondents buy individually or in bulk, or do not buy the product at all. Since only two why statements are defined here, only one requires an id in order to ensure their ids will not be altered if the order is switched, with the system automatically generating a Q2_WHY id for the 1st statement.

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NPS ratings

In the example below, respondents are asked to rate their experience with various computer companies on an NPS scale of 0-10. The why tag is applied here to solicit a follow up response on why they rated the company as they did.

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Displaying follow up question on another page

The why tag will also accept the ap: y decorator to allow users to view the follow-up why question on a separate page from the original question.

See demo See code Restart demo

Data

When a question or variable has the why tag applied to it, each why statement will be treated as its own question. For example, if a question has 3 why statements, each will be treated like a separate question in the reports for the survey and will be listed immediately after the question they were applied to, displayed in the order in which they were written in the question's code.

If no ID was assigned to the why statements when coded, the system will automatically assign one to each of them (e.g., Q1_WHY, Q1_WHY2, Q1_WHY3, etc.) .

How the why statements are shown will be unique to the situation in which they are viewed. Some of the more common ways you may encounter why statements in the data are:

• As selectable fields in the Field Selector used for creating reports and data cuts.
  

• As column headers for the results in a Response report.
  

• As separate tiles in a Topline report with the 'why' statement under the ID number.
  

• As separate response fields in a Frequency Report.