WebQuest. Question-File Quick-Start Instructions

Transcription

1 Contents WebQuest Question-File Quick-Start Instructions 1 Introduction 1 2 Where to Start Questionnaire on Paper Questionnaire in Electronic Format (Word, PDF, etc.) Starting From Scratch Creating your Question-File Survey Title Survey Introductory Text WebQuest Commands Consent Options Identity Page Progress Bar Likert ticklist Splitting the Survey across Pages textarea Repeating Answers Debrief Introduction In short, the questionnaire system (WebQuest) converts a list of questions (from a question- le) into an online web questionnaire, and stores participants' responses in a form that you can load into SPSS and Excel. Neil Carter 1 of

2 All you need to do is provide a le containing the questions and their associated answeroptions; WebQuest will automatically arrange the questions and answers into a suitable web format without you needing to do any `programming'. You will receive a notication every time a participant completes (as opposed to starts) your questionnaire, and you can obtain by the results for all participants simply by visiting a special web page. WebQuest is designed to spare users from having to learn web programming, and a fairly sophisticated questionnaire can be written without the use of any special HTML/web code. Nevertheless, it allows your questionnaire's pages to contain just about anything that a web page could contain (within reason). Thus, if you are familiar with HTML, you can customise your questionnaire with things like pictures, audio and video, dynamic or interactive features like applets, and so forth. 2 Where to Start There are three main ways in which you might make a start on writing your questionnaire le, depending on what form the questionnaire is in. You could write your own from scratch, or you might already have a pre-written questionnaire on paper, or you might have it stored in a le like a Microsoft Word document or a PDF. 2.1 Questionnaire on Paper If the questionnaire is long, and it would take a lot of time to type it in, you can avoid the typing by using the department's OCR (Optical Character Recognition) system to convert the text on the paper into an electronic document. See Neil for further details. 2.2 Questionnaire in Electronic Format (Word, PDF, etc.) If the document is in Word format, you'll need to convert it to plain text format. This can be done easily, by using Word's Save As feature, with the le type set to Plain Text, as illustrated below: Neil Carter 2 of

3 Note that you should click the Other encoding option, and scroll up the list to select Unicode (select the plain Unicode option, not the other ones). This is illustrated below: Neil Carter 3 of

4 If the document is in a PDF le, there are limits to what you can do, since PDF is typically used to prevent copying to other formats. You can usually obtain the text successfully, but the formatting might require some eort to re-arrange into the correct form. Just use the Save as feature and choose Plain text. 2.3 Starting From Scratch If you intend to write your own questionnaire, it's probably best if you download the demonstration question-le from the introductory page of the online demo questionnaire. You then edit this using Windows' built-in text editor, Notepad. 3 Creating your Question-File OK, let's assume you've got Notepad open and are ready to start writing/editing your question le. First of all, save the (empty) le with the appropriate name. The name of your question le is critical. I will have told you what the name is, but it is almost certainly your student number (followed by.txt, if you have congured Windows to show le name extensions). Neil Carter 4 of

5 The following screenshot depicts what you should see. Note that the Encoding option should be set to Unicode. 3.1 Survey Title As for the content of your survey, the rst part is the title, which might be something like Sports Participation. Put this name on the rst line of your question le, thus: Neil Carter 5 of

6 Now, this will appear as a banner at the top of every page of your survey. 3.2 Survey Introductory Text Next, you should provide an introduction to your survey, along with the consent text, as required by the ethics committee. So, on the next lines, add something like this: Neil Carter 6 of

7 3.3 WebQuest Commands You need to tell WebQuest where your introduction ends, so that it can present it on its own page, before the questions are presented. The way to tell WebQuest what you want is through the use of commands. These are short, simple words, preceded by three asterisks (so that WebQuest knows that they are commands, and not just part of your questionnaire's text), and must appear on a line on their own. The command for indicating the end of the introduction and consent page is introduction end, so add the following text to your question le. Neil Carter 7 of

8 3.4 Consent Options To indicate consent (or not), the participant can click on one of two links. The links take the participant to the next stage of the survey if they consent, or straight to the debrief, if they do not consent. The links are created automatically for you, but you can adjust the text that appears in each link. On the next line of the question le, WebQuest expects the text for the consent link, and on the line after that it expects the text for the do-not-consent text. Finally, to indicate the end of the consent options, WebQuest looks for the command consent end. So, add the following lines to the end of the question le: Neil Carter 8 of

9 Now that we have nished the rst part of our survey, we can upload it to the server to see how it looks. Upload your question-le, following the instructions provided in the administration guide. Your question le will be immediately active, so go to the URL for your web survey; you should see something like this: Neil Carter 9 of

10 This looks a bit plain, so, without knowing too much HTML web page language, we can make it look a bit better. Surrounding each part of the text with an appropriate tag will make the text appear dierently. Tags are characters and digits placed inside angle brackets. For instance <h3> marks the start of a second-level heading, and <p> means the start of a Paragraph. The slash character changes the tag to mean the end of the section. For instance, </p> means the end of a paragraph. Change the text to match the following: Neil Carter 10 of

11 <ul> means Un-numbered List (i.e. a bulleted list), and <li> means List Item. Please don't worry about having to know HTML, this is about as much HTML as you need for WebQuest; it puts the vast majority of the HTML in for you. This is what our introductory page should look like now; much nicer: Neil Carter 11 of

12 3.5 Identity Page If the participant chooses to consent, they are presented with a new web page where they can enter a name. Actually, they can enter anything they like here; nothing is done with this information other than to record it in a special identity le. As you will realise, standard procedure for psychological experiments is to store the identity of the participant (in this case, the name they entered on the ID page) separately to their answers, linking the two with a special unique ID number. This is handled automatically by WebQuest, and all you see is the participants' responses along with their unique ID number. If you need to nd out who a particular ID number relates to, then you should contact me directly, but not that I can only tell you what the name was that they entered on the ID page; I have no reliable means of working out exactly who entered that name. You can give the participant some instructions about what you want them to enter for their name (e.g. an address, if you want to contact them), by adding the text to the question-le, immediately after the consent end command. You tell WebQuest where this instruction text ends with the identity end command, thus: Neil Carter 12 of

13 3.6 Progress Bar Next, WebQuest expects you to indicate how many questions your survey contains. It uses this number in order to calibrate a progress-indicator (so that on the 25 th question out of 100, the bar is one quarter of the way along). It doesn't matter what you enter here (as long as it's a reasonable number), since it won't break the system. So, just type in a rough estimate. If you would prefer not to show the progress bar, enter 0 on this line. On the next line, you should enter the title you want for the progress bar. By default, this is Your progress:, but you can enter anything you like, within reason. Disabling the progress bar might be a good idea for very long questionnaires; seeing the progress bar move slowly might put o some participants! For now, keep things simple, and disable the progress bar with a zero, but note that you will still have to put something on the next line, where the bar's title goes; in this case, just put a hyphen (whatever you type will be ignored, but you must have a line of something here): Neil Carter 13 of

14 Now you are ready to start writing your questions. In surveys, the questions generally indicate how the answer should be given. The main categories of answer-type are: ˆ mutually-exclusive options (only one can be chosen at a time, e.g. Likert) ˆ independent options (none, one, or more can be chosen at a time, e.g. a checklist) ˆ free-form text (the participant types in anything they want). The rst two dictate what choices the participant has, but the last one obviously gives them a lot more control. 3.7 Likert The Likert scale is a very common answer-type for psychological survey questions. So, let's add a question and answer. Suppose we want to nd out how much the participant enjoys participating in sport; we could write the following: Neil Carter 14 of

15 The rst line contains the command telling WebQuest that we want a Likert scale, the next line (the hyphen) tells WebQuest to use the default label options (more on those later), and the next line indicates how many options the scale has. The next lines (ve in this case) contain the options values, Agree Strongly to Disagree Strongly; the rst line contains the left-hand option, and vice-versa across the screen. Immediately after the option-values comes the line containing the question. Do not leave any blank lines in amongst these lines, or WebQuest will get confused and the questions and answer text will be jumbled up. Note that the question is preceded by some text and three asterisks. This is the way you can specify the variable name to be used for this question/answer as it appears in SPSS or Excel. The text you add in front of the asterisks will not appear on the web page, but it will be used as the column heading in the results le, which means that SPSS and Excel can treat it as the variable name for the values in that column. 3.8 ticklist It's likely that many participants take part in more than one sport, so, if we wanted to know in what sports the participant was active, we'd want to allow them to select more than one. We can use the ticklist command for answers like that: Neil Carter 15 of

16 Note that, unlike the other question types, the ticklist requires that the variable names are applied to the answer-options instead of the questions. This is because the participant can give more than one answer to ticklist questions, and each answer must be recorded separately. WARNING: A common mistake is to use a ticklist where the participant is expected to pick only one option. In this case, the participant might change their mind about answering Yes to a question, and go back and tick the No option without unticking the Yes. In your results le, it will appear that the participant answered both yes and no, so their answer to this question will have to be excluded from the statistics. 3.9 Splitting the Survey across Pages Experts recommend that web pages are kept short to avoid too much vertical scrolling. WebQuest allows you to break your survey up into pages, and the command to do this is (unsurprisingly) page. Tell WebQuest to place a page break after the second question, by adding the command to the end of the text we have so far: Neil Carter 16 of

17 WebQuest will stop the page at this point, and place a big green button marked Next, enabling the participant to progress to the next page. This is what our survey looks like now: Neil Carter 17 of

18 You probably won't be able to resist clicking the next button. But WebQuest has nowhere to go after this point in our question le, so it issues an error message: Neil Carter 18 of

19 That'll teach you. In order to catch that error, we obviously need to add more questions. Let's add some questions that require a text answer: 3.10 textarea For small entries like numbers or names, for instance, the textarea is most suitable. It allows a label to be displayed alongside, which could be used to indicate the units (e.g. years) for the value to be entered: Neil Carter 19 of

20 The rst line we add is the textarea command. On the line below, we add the height (in lines), and on the next line we add the width (in characters) of the box; the size of the box gives participants a hint as to what size of answer we're expecting. Note that the actual size is only an approximation due to the discrepancy between the fonts and browsers potentially used by participants. The fourth line contains the label for the box, which is typically used to show the units for the value. On the fth line, the actual question appears. Finally, we insert a page command to avoid seeing the error we had last time. The resultant web page looks as follows. Neil Carter 20 of

21 3.11 Repeating Answers Many questionnaires consist of a consecutive sequence of questions that share exactly the same set of answer-options. For questions like this, WebQuest allows you to type the questions without having to type the answer-options, thus saving a lot of time and eort. All you do is type the questions under the same command section. For instance, suppose you wanted to ask three questions, all with the same answer-options ranging from Disagree Strongly to Agree Strongly. In this case, you would write the following: Neil Carter 21 of

22 WebQuest repeats the answer options for each question under that command. The sequence of questions ends with the next command; in this case, the page command. Neil Carter 22 of

23 3.12 Debrief It is standard practice to end your survey with some concluding remarks, explaining to the participant the reasons for the survey, and thanking them for their contribution. You tell WebQuest where to end the survey (and start the debrief) with the command questions end, which must occur immediately after a page command. No further commands are needed (although you can use the page command if you want); the debrief will end with the end of the question-le. Thus: Neil Carter 23 of

24 Which gives the following result: Neil Carter 24 of

25 Neil Carter 25 of