Was curious if there was an easy way to capture, and store, the amount of time between questions in a survey for each individual user.

thanks,

rob

When creating a survey, you can put yes to the "Save timings?" settings.

In code, it's the "savetimings" setting which is this line in XML

<savetimings><![CDATA[Y]]></savetimings>


Then in the file you export through the UI, you make sure the time related columns are selected (in Column control) and they will appear at the end of each row of answer (let's say in a csv file).

But as far as using code to export the time, I just posted a question about this since I couldn't find it anywhere

Thanks for the reply back to my question.

I just came across the "Save Timings" setting you mention. So is that saving the time, in the mysql database, after each question is anwered by the survey taker?

thanks,

rob

From what I understand it's for each group of questions on page load.

I'm not sure exactly how the whole timer works but is for group of questions. So if you have 3 questions displayed at the same time (a group), it will record in the DB how long a spends on each page.

Here's an exported survey CSV with the time spent

It depends on how your survey is set up. Limesurvey can only register when you move to a new page. It doesn't write answer times (like when someone clicked a button), but when the person moved from page to page. So if all of your questions are on one page, it obviously can only record the time for the whole survey. If it is group by group for the group and if it is question by question for the question.

If you need the time to answer between the question on one page, you would need to put a Javascript "listener" somehow and write this into hidden questions.

Gotcha. It is set up as a question by question, so by definition I should be capturing the time between questions as the user moves from page to page. I'll give it a try.

Thanks to everyone for their reponses.

rob

Just thought I'd close the loop on this one. When I change this to a question by question designation in the "Presentation and Navigation" section AND go to the "Notification and Data Management" section and change the "Save Timings" to "Yes" it tracks the time between each question in the database. As mentioned earlier in the post, the time starts and ends when the user clicks "Next" to move to the next question.