Hi!

I am currently preparing a fairly big survey and at the beginning of the survey I have a fairly big screen out section.

Problem is, that Limesurvey doesn't really have a real screen out functionality. Yes, with a zero quota I could do something similar, but it is not the same. There is no immediate response. Usually you should screen out immediately, but seems like the survey is running through until the end.

I think I have set the zero quota correctly. For example, I have a question that is asking wether the person has a pickup truck or not. If the person says yes, he/she shall proceed, if the answer is "no", "don't know", "no response" the questionnaire should be closed.

But if I remember some of the discussions here right, then it won't close the survey immediately, but let the person go until the end.

As this questionnaire is for data entry only, it is not so much of a big deal, I could just delete the options that are not allowed, but this is not ideal, because they miss in the data set later on and i would have to insert them manually.

Is there any way how to get a real screen out? Is something like this planned for future releases? I guess there are a lot of others out there who would need real screen outs.

Or am I doing something wrong and the survey should close immediately?

holch-

I typically use group-level relevance to implement screen-out.

So, at the end of the screening questions, I set a variable (Equation question) called "ask" to be true if the person should continue with the survey. This is usually a pretty complex equation, but can be easily encoded using EM.

Then, the group-level relevance equation for every remaining group in the survey is:

If you have many groups, you can use the Excel import/export feature to quickly set the group-level relevance for all of your groups and re-import the survey.

Of course, sometimes I need custom group-level relevance, so I just use something like this for those groups:

Then, you can create group with relevance

To provide a custom message for the user indicating why they can't be part of the study. And even if they click next, it will just submit the survey (and all the data will be NULL other than the screening part of your survey). You could combine this with quota so that the data record gets completely deleted in such cases.

Hi Thomas, sounds good, but to be hones: I didn't understand a thing!

Also: I will need this on a question level and not a group level. Does this change anything?

And were do I put those equations?

I think the expression manager is a little over my head at the moment.

holch-

Try the Sample Census demo. It implements a group-level screen out. One of the questions on the first page is "how many people live with you". It only asks questions about that many people on subsequent groups. Use the Show Survey Logic button to see how the conditional (relevance) logic works.

I've also updated the main documentation to show exactly where and how to enter relevance equations to implement the conditional logic.

Hi Thomas!

Thank you for the response. I'll have a look at it. But if I understood right, this is still some kind of condition and has to be applied to all subsequent questions, right?

A screen out usually should just guide to an alternative end page (just like quota would do) and end the survey.

I am not quite sure why a zero quota doesn't close directly anyway. I'll have a look at the questionnaire you mentioned. But as this has to be used for data entry soon, I guess I'll just go the easy way and remove the answer options that should close the survey. Not very nice, but this will do the same thing - you can't proceed if you don't mark the right answer (only works because it is for data entry for a paper & pencil study). Because until I get through the EM, our study is probably over...

Looking at the census your suggestions is more like a condition than an actuall screen out.

Of course I could apply a condition to every single question following, but as the screen outs usually happen within the first few questions this would mean to copy this condition to all questions that follow. Additionally, this would mean that the person actually is registered as a finished interview, which shouldn't be.

A screen out is more like the zero quote. But as the zero quote works at the moment (you still have to go through the whole questionnaire!), this doesn't make much sense.

Especially when you are doing research with panels, they require you to send the screen outs to a specific url, which would be just like quota. But If I guide them through the whole questionnaire, they won't be considered as a screen out anymore.

I remember that this worked different before. I am quite sure (but I might be wrong, as I was quite sure with a few things before and it turned out I was wrong - I seem to have a very active imagination when it comes to LS features... *lol*).

What would be necessary for this kind of situation would be the possibility to tell Limesurvey to close the survey at that point and redirect the participants to a specific URL or give them a message, just like quota would do. But immediate response would be necessary. No Panel provider will accept that I have their panelists to go through the whole questionnaire and then to be told, that they did not qualify for the survey, which would mean the won't get paid an incentive.

I had thought I have done something wrong, but I gave the quota a try with a little test survey and there is nothing happening. The survey goes on, even if the zero quota should close down after the first question.

Looking at the wikipage for quotas they should actually close immediately.

docs.limesurvey.org/Quotas&structure=Eng...tions+for+LimeSurvey

I guess it is a "active survey thing" again. So I tested this on my little test survey and once it is activated, the screen out message shows. So this is actually the desired behaviour. This is how it should work.

I guess I either did something wrong, or there is some technical problem. Will have a new look at it.

Oh man, I am stupid. It is official now.

What did I do wrong? As I do have quite a few screen out questions and all need to be zero quotas, I created one zero quota and added all answers that would need a zero quota to that. But what LS does is basically to take this as a "and", not an "or" as I had expected.

So by adding various answers to this quota I reduced the chance to close this quota with every answer I added.

holch-

If you use group-level relevance (or even question-level relevance), LS will skip all of the irrelevant groups. So, even if your survey has 100 groups, it will only take a few seconds at most for LS to analyze each of irrelevant groups and flag all of those irrelevant groups as NULL.

So, the group-level relevance lets you effectively screen out subjects.

TMSWhite: Relevancy in case of quotas is determined by counting the number of certain reponses given to a question. I don't think that EM can do that yet.

However in the long run, quotas and conditions should be merged.