Add text area for "other" within multiple choice survey questions?

sarahcohen

I'm creating a survey where several of the questions have an "other" option at the end of the list. If the responder chooses "other", we'd like to add a text field somehow that follows-up to ask them what that "other" is. Likewise, for some of the questions, we'd like to add a "why?" field after so that they can, if they choose, explain why they picked a certain answer in the multiple choice area.

Are any of these possible? Should I build the form in a different way (perhaps asking for comments after each question that might have them)? I'm not full sure how to get the results I'd like using the survey question builder.

Adrian Cotter

Hey Sarah,

So I think the best way is to simply add additional questions after each question which might have the "other" choice, or where you want a "why".

In the survey results, these would show up as additional columns (if you downloaded them into Excel for instance).

If you wanted it to look a little better for your users -- you could copy the HTML of the survey into a pagebuilder page, and adjust how the form looks by hand (making the "other"s and "why"s more visually connected to the appropriate question). This would NOT change how the results would come out... (the other values would still be in a separate column).

One might be able to do some JS trickery to adjust the survey results (replacing "other" with the actual value in the "other" field, and maybe not having that extra other column in the actual survey), but I'm not sure how well that would play with the survey results, and is probably more work than is really worth it.

Adrian

Michael

I think I would do a combination of the things Adrian mentioned. I'd create the survey with the extra fields set as optional, then using a JavaScript, I'd set the display to "none" on those textarea blanks. Then, using JS, you add an event handler for onChange to the initial blanks that checks their value and sets the additional info blanks you hid to show up when the value is other, or whatever. If not, they are, or remain, hidden.

Without looking at the underlying HTML Convio generates for the Survey form, I can't really say whether this would be hard or easy. At the very least, once you've created you form you could produce a script that works specifically for that form, but whether such a script would be easily portable for subsequet forms, I can't say without studying the markup. It really depends on how well Convio ids each element. If they are poorly identified (as they are on Donation Forms) what I've described wouldn't be easy to replicate. That said, if you took Adrien's suggestion about creating the form in PageBuilder instead, you could make sure things were set up according to good markup best practices each time and the script would work properly.

David Hart

There is a standard question type of "Multiple choice combo box" that is specifically for the first scenario you mentioned.

sarahcohen

DavidHart :

There is a standard question type of "Multiple choice combo box" that is specifically for the first scenario you mentioned.

Thank you so much! Of course, the simplest solution is correct. I only wish I had known this several weeks ago. For some reason everyone chose to give me the most complicated advice ignoring the most obvious solution. Could it be that it was not clear to other people either? It is not very clear when setting up the question that it will create an "other" box. The only place this is explained/visible is on the preview page after the question has been created. Is there some way this can be made more clear on the question set up page so that other people don't have the same issue I did?