What is a Group Question and How to Set it up?

Main use:

This question type is mainly used to combine group of questions or to create an umbrella question with sub-questions inside. In this way, the user can control the routing or define the question flow how they want to show sub-questions to participants and help with the question flow. 

There are three ways to show sub-questions in a group - 1) to show all the questions in order, 2) to show all the questions randomly, 3) to randomly pick one or a few question(s) to show. 

How to set up in the platform:

1. In the Questionnaire Builder page, add new question OR insert new question by hovering over an existing question and click the green (+) button (either above or below the existing question)

2. Select Group from the popup menu that appears.

3. Write your question number or Group label in the upper box.

4. Select the question that will fall into this Group. On the left side of the Question Builder, the Group will be created as new question and the sub-questions will line up below the Group.

Note: You can only add question from the existing list of questions. If the questions are not yet prepared, you need to create individual questions separately before adding them to the group.

5. Once you've selected the questions, select the Question Display Options

We offer 3 options under Question Display Options

Show all in order:

When the questions are grouped in this setting, the questions will all be asked according to the order indicated in the Question Tree sidebar. In the following example, the questions under Group will be asked in the following order: 2 Tag ->2 Appeal -> 2 OE -> 2 TH. If you want to make any changes to the order, you can simply drag and relocate the question card in the Question Tree.

When to use:  

This is often used when you want to apply a bulk action to a group of questions without disrupting the initial sequence of the questions. E.g. When you want to add the same logic to 10 questions that stay together, instead of adding the same logic 10 times, you can add the 10 question into a Group and then add the logic to the Group. This way, the logic will be applied to all the 10 questions under the Group. 

Randomize all and randomly pick some:

When the questions are grouped in this setting, the system will randomly pick one or a few questions to ask according to the number of users specified and ask the questions in a randomized order. 

Please note: The number of questions selected randomly should be more than one but not exceed the total number of questions within the group.

When to use: 

• This can generally be used when we want to control the # of questions asked per participant. For example, in a brand test study, we first ask the participants what brands they would like to recommend from a long brand list of 10 brands. We then follow up on why they would like to recommend the brand among those who would recommend it. For each participant, we probably don't want to ask the reasons for each brand that they would like to recommend, but instead, randomly select 3 brands (to avoid asking too many questions for a participant). To do this, we can create a why question for each brand and set the pre-condition that to show the question only when the respective brand is recommended by the participant. We then add all the questions into a Group, and randomly choose 3 of them to ask.
  • Please note, if any questions under a Group have pre-conditions, like in this case, the system will first execute the pre-conditions and then do a random selection. It means the system will first filter out the questions that satisfy the pre-conditions, and then randomly pick 2 questions to ask if there are more than 2 questions that meet the pre-conditions. On the other hand, if there are only 2 or fewer questions that satisfy the pre-condition, the system will show all those questions.
• This is also often used to set up a Monadic Test when you only want to expose a single concept. Please see more details about how to set up a Monadic Survey in a new article here:  How to set up a Monadic Test

Randomize all

When the questions are grouped in this setting, the system will ask all the questions under the Group in a randomized order.

When to use: 

• This is typically used to avoid order bias in the questions under the Group. For example, in a brand test study, we first ask the participants what brands they would like to recommend. We then follow up on why they would like to recommend the brand among those who would recommend it. When asking the "Why" questions, we want to randomize the order for brands to avoid order bias. To do this, we can create a why question for each brand and set the pre-condition that to show the question only when the respective brand is recommended by the participant. We then add all the questions into a Group, and randomize all the questions.
• This is also often used to set up a Sequential Monadic Test when you want to show all of your concepts but in a randomized order to eliminate the bias order. Please see more details about how to set up a Sequential Monadic Survey here: How to set up a Sequential Monadic Test