Multiple Questions Displayed at the Same Time

Best Practice

Sometimes a set of questions should be displayed at the same time on the tablet during the interview, without swiping. This is useful if the answer to a question has two parts, for example, a question of distance where both an amount and a unit of that amount is asked. Other examples, in addition to distance, are time duration (in minutes, hours, days...), land area (in acres, hectares...), salary (per week, per month, per year...). The respondent will have to choose between all these units of measurement after announcing the amount. Best practice is to enter the integer (amount, price, quantity...) and select the unit on the same screen for an easier reading. In these cases, data is collected with less error if both amount and unit can be recorded on the same screen. See link to an example in the next section.

Another reason to display multiple questions on one screen could be that a set of yes and no questions are asked with a better flow if the enumerator does not have to swipe and re-read the full question for each question. An example could be if we are asking about a households assets and we ask, "Does your household own any of the following assets?". See link to an example in the next section.

Coding Example

Here is a code example that shows example of both cases mentioned above.

Note that both answer options, meter and kilometer are provided as distance units despite the conversion between the two being simple. We always want to record the answer the way the respondent answered the question and we should never ask the enumerator to do arithmetic in the field. Later, we can convert all the units in the dataset to standardize quantity, distance, and time measurements across observations.

An "other specify" option can be selected in the list of units of measurement if the respondent's answer is not available on the list.

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This article is part of the topic SurveyCTO Coding Practices