I have been struggling for the past couple of days on the syntax required for using a series of equation type questions for another calculation. I'm sure it is something simple and I am somewhat embarrassed to ask . . .

I have attached a sample survey to calculate the Addiction Severity Index for a series of questions related to Alcohol usage. On the second page of the survey, you will see some of the checks and various calculations I have tried. The first of the calculations works perfectly. (This is the one that says "The ASI for Alcohol Use = XXXX."

When I attempt an alternative calculation, however, in order to account for questions that may not have been answered, I get a concatenation, rather than an addition. I even ran checks on the equation questions to make sure they were numeric. This alternative calculation is based upon a series of previous equation questions.

I am using version 1.92+ build 120808.

Thanks!

tfj

That might be a bug. The JavaScript portion of EM is supposed to concatenate strings, but add numbers when it sees the "+" sign.

I never ran into that myself because I always use the sum() function which will solve your immediate problem:

ASIAlcohol =
ASIAlc2 =

Thank you for your help!

When I put the following for the question for ASIAlc2:

{sum(Alc30Calc, Intox30Calc, AlcProb30Calc, AlcTroub30Calc, AlcTxImpCalc, (LogAlcExp/44)}

I get the attached. I tried other combinations, but had no luck.

tfj

If you hover your mouse over the word sum (which is surrounded by a red box), it will tell you that you are missing a closing parenthesis.

You need either:
or

Oops. Many thanks. It is interesting, though, how my two calculations, the original ASIAlc and the new ASIAlc2 don't quite match, but they are very close -- I'll do some more digging.

Thank you for your help . . . I totally forgot that hover part.

tfj