Hey! Hello.

I'm using LimeSurvey to anonymously gather data on students from my city. It's a big student city, there are a lot of big different universities.

I'm willing to elicit different type of information:
- Name of the University(ies)
- Program(s) followed
- Level(s) of education

Why do I use the plural? Because it happens often that for instance a student does its Bachelor Degree in Engineering in University X, Mechanical program. Then does a Master Degree in Innovation Management in the University Y. And then why not a Ph. D. in Poney Riding in another third university, the famous University Z.

So far after bashing my head on the subject for a couple of hours, the easiest way I found to be user-friendly, not boring and/or laborious and/or repetitive, is to leave an open space with an example.

Like this:

"Please indicate your academic background with the following information: diploma(s), university(ies) and program(s).
Here is an example:
Bachelor in Mechanical Engineering, University of Bear
Master Research in Biomaterials, University of the Pigeon
Ph. D in Biomaterials, University of the Fish".

And then, when the data is collected, I will myself dive into the data and label/sort/standardise the information so that it can be exploited.

Do you have any advice regarding that problem I have?

Thank you very much for your time and answer,

Neurotically yours,

Dunkey.

I think that any time you use open text questions to collect hard data you leave yourself exposed to errors.

I would have a question "How many universities have you attended?", followed by several question groups shown conditionally on the answer to that question. each of those groups would have a single choice question for university name and a multiple choice for the program(s).

I addition to reducing errors, clicking through those groups would be less onerous than having to type it all out.

Good evening Tony, thanks for your answer

I took your advice and try to tinker something that, I think, would work.

Here is a link with a picture.
imgur.com/5YNLzBP

Basically there are three question groups, only the first one is mandatory, and the two after are optional. So that respondents with a Bachelor can just fill that in, and people who did longer studies can fill in up to three degrees.

The degree type as well as the university are among a list, whereas the program has to be written down by the respondents. After a couple of tries, it seemed to me the easiest way to deal with the program, because go through ALL the programs of ALL the degrees of ALL universities seemed really tedious to me compared to a quick sorting out once I have the data.

Thanks for your previous advice, and if you have some insight concerning my solution it is warmly welcomed

Goodbye!