+1 vote

I'd like to create a survey that contains a matrix questionnaire on a single page with several questions in the left column and a multiple-choice response scale on the right.

For example:

Question 1 | {Option A} {Option B} {Option C}
Question 2 | {Option A} {Option B} {Option C}
Question 3 | {Option A} {Option B} {Option C}
Question 4 | {Option A} {Option B} {Option C}

Is this possible to achieve in Guided Track? Thank you.

by (150 points)

1 Answer

0 votes

GuidedTrack currently doesn't support matrix questions in the exact form you're asking for. We've had this request before and looked into adding matrix questions, but each time this has come up we've decided against it. There are two main reasons for this:

  1. Matrix questions are hard to use

When we talk to survey participants, they're generally pretty emphatic that they find the layout hard to work with. They tend to take longer to fill out these questions and we suspect they make more mistakes while doing so. One of the principles we try to abide by in GuidedTrack is to prevent people from building the wrong thing when we can, and there seems to be some evidence that replacing matrix questions with vertical multiple choice questions is better for participants and for the quality of the data you get our of your studies.

  1. Matrix questions don't work well on small screens

Horizontal space is very limited on mobile phones and matrix questions require a lot of it – you need to fit the question text and all the answers on the same row. Making this work on phones is a difficult task, and, compounded with the usability problems mentioned above, is further reason to choose an alternative way of collecting data.

My suggestion is to try converting the matrix questionnaire into a series of multiple choice questions that share the same scale. This is very easy to do in GuidedTrack:

>> scale = ["Option A", "Option B", "Option C"]

*page
	*question: Question 1
		*answers: scale

	*question: Question 2
		*answers: scale

	*question: Question 3
		*answers: scale

So far, each time we've suggested this approach it has turned out to be a good replacement for matrix questions. I hope it works for you as well.

Further resources

by (1.8k points)
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