Creating a Collection

Collections are groups of related questions. In the Survey Designer, collections appear as folders in the left pane. The items they contain appear in the right pane.

Grouping questions into collections provides three benefits:

  • Easily reuse collections of commonly used questions: simply drag and drop the collection into a new survey.
  • Apply show-if conditions to entire collections.
  • The Data Manager has features to simplify querying and downloading data that have been grouped into a collection.

Let’s create a collection called “Employment” with some questions about the participant’s job.

  1. Click the Add a collection icon
    creating collection 2
  1. Next to Unique name, type EMPLOYMENT.  We cannot call the collection employment, because there is already a survey variable called employment.
    creating collection 1
  1. We want to show the questions in this collection only to participants who indicate they are currently employed. Click the Show-if tab. Under Show State, check “Only show if…“
  1. Click the SURVEY folder to show the questions in the Root collection.
  1. Click the EMPLOYED question.
  1. Under EMPLOYED, select > (greater than) from the list of tests, and (1) I am not currently employed from the list of responses.  The is essentially the same as only show this question if they select any other option but I am not currently employed.
  1. Click the Add button.
    creating collection 3
  1. The new collection appears in the Left pane of the Survey Editor with the label “Employment (0)“. The zero indicates the number of items in the collection.
  1. Click on the collection. The folder icon opens, and the right pane of the Designer window is blank.
    creating collection 4
  1. With the EMPLOYMENT collection still selected, click the Add Question icon  in the tool bar to add a question to this collection.
  1. In the General tab, set the Display Type to “Text Field“, and type “What is your job title?” for the prompt.
  1. Click the Response Options tab and set the data type to “Text“.
  1. Click the Data Dictionary tab, and type “JOBTITLE” for the unique name.
  1. Click OK to add the question to the survey.
    creating collection 5
  1. Now click SURVEY on the left pane and find the Employment question on the right pane. Click on the employment question and drag it into the EMPLOYMENT_COLLECTION.  Drag it over the folder icon on the right pane and the folder will open, showing that you can drop the question into that collection.  You now have two questions in the collection.