webquest question-file quick-start instructions...

WebQuest Tutorial

WebQuest

Question-File Quick-Start

Instructions

Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Where to Start 2

2.1 Questionnaire on Paper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

2.2 Questionnaire in Electronic Format (Word, PDF, etc.) . . . . . . . . . . . 2

2.3 Starting From Scratch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

3 Creating your Question-File 4

3.1 Survey Title . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

3.2 Survey Introductory Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

3.3 WebQuest Commands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

3.4 Consent Options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

3.5 Identity Page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

3.6 Progress Bar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

3.7 Likert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

3.8 ticklist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

3.9 Splitting the Survey across Pages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

3.10 textarea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

3.11 Repeating Answers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

3.12 Debrief . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

1 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 thatyou can load into SPSS and Excel.

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WebQuest Tutorial

All you need to do is provide a �le containing the questions and their associated answer-options; WebQuest will automatically arrange the questions and answers into a suitableweb format without you needing to do any `programming'. You will receive a noti�cationemail every time a participant completes (as opposed to starts) your questionnaire, andyou can obtain by email the results for all participants simply by visiting a special webpage.

WebQuest is designed to spare users from having to learn web programming, and a fairlysophisticated questionnaire can be written without the use of any special HTML/webcode. Nevertheless, it allows your questionnaire's pages to contain just about anythingthat a web page could contain (within reason). Thus, if you are familiar with HTML, youcan customise your questionnaire with things like pictures, audio and video, dynamic orinteractive 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 fromscratch, or you might already have a pre-written questionnaire on paper, or you mighthave 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 avoidthe typing by using the department's OCR (Optical Character Recognition) system toconvert 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 canbe done easily, by using Word's Save As feature, with the �le type set to Plain Text,as illustrated below:


WebQuest Tutorial

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


WebQuest Tutorial

If the document is in a PDF �le, there are limits to what you can do, since PDF is typicallyused to prevent copying to other formats. You can usually obtain the text successfully,but the formatting might require some e�ort to re-arrange into the correct form. Just usethe 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 thedemonstration 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 yourquestion �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 studentnumber (followed by .txt, if you have con�gured Windows to show �le name extensions).


WebQuest Tutorial

The following screenshot depicts what you should see. Note that the Encoding optionshould 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:


WebQuest Tutorial

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, asrequired by the ethics committee. So, on the next lines, add something like this:


WebQuest Tutorial

3.3 WebQuest Commands

You need to tell WebQuest where your introduction ends, so that it can present it onits own page, before the questions are presented. The way to tell WebQuest what youwant is through the use of commands. These are short, simple words, preceded by threeasterisks (so that WebQuest knows that they are commands, and not just part of yourquestionnaire's text), and must appear on a line on their own.

The command for indicating the end of the introduction and consent page is introductionend, so add the following text to your question �le.


WebQuest Tutorial

3.4 Consent Options

To indicate consent (or not), the participant can click on one of two links. The linkstake the participant to the next stage of the survey if they consent, or straight to thedebrief, if they do not consent. The links are created automatically for you, but you canadjust the text that appears in each link. On the next line of the question �le, WebQuestexpects the text for the consent link, and on the line after that it expects the text for thedo-not-consent text. Finally, to indicate the end of the consent options, WebQuest looksfor the command consent end. So, add the following lines to the end of the question�le:


WebQuest Tutorial

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


WebQuest Tutorial

This looks a bit plain, so, without knowing too much HTML web page language, we canmake it look a bit better. Surrounding each part of the text with an appropriate �tag�will make the text appear di�erently. Tags are characters and digits placed inside anglebrackets. For instance <h3> marks the start of a second-level heading, and <p> meansthe start of a Paragraph. The slash character changes the tag to mean the end of thesection. For instance, </p> means the end of a paragraph. Change the text to matchthe following:

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WebQuest Tutorial

<ul> means Un-numbered List (i.e. a bulleted list), and <li> means List Item. Pleasedon'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 introductorypage should look like now; much nicer:

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WebQuest Tutorial

3.5 Identity Page

If the participant chooses to consent, they are presented with a new web page where theycan enter a name. Actually, they can enter anything they like here; nothing is done withthis information other than to record it in a special identity �le.

As you will realise, standard procedure for psychological experiments is to store the iden-tity of the participant (in this case, the name they entered on the ID page) separately totheir answers, linking the two with a special unique ID number. This is handled auto-matically by WebQuest, and all you see is the participants' responses along with theirunique ID number. If you need to �nd out who a particular ID number relates to, thenyou should contact me directly, but not that I can only tell you what the name was thatthey entered on the ID page; I have no reliable means of working out exactly who enteredthat name.

You can give the participant some instructions about what you want them to enter fortheir name (e.g. an email address, if you want to contact them), by adding the text tothe question-�le, immediately after the consent end command. You tell WebQuest wherethis instruction text ends with the identity end command, thus:

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WebQuest Tutorial

3.6 Progress Bar

Next, WebQuest expects you to indicate how many questions your survey contains. Ituses this number in order to calibrate a progress-indicator (so that on the 25th questionout 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 arough 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 theprogress 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 somethingon the next line, where the bar's title goes; in this case, just put a hyphen (whatever youtype will be ignored, but you must have a line of something here):

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WebQuest Tutorial

Now you are ready to start writing your questions.

In surveys, the questions generally indicate how the answer should be given. The maincategories of answer-type are:

� mutually-exclusive options (only one can be chosen at a time, e.g. Likert)

� independent options (none, one, or more can be chosen at a time, e.g. a checklist)

� free-form text (the participant types in anything they want).

The �rst two dictate what choices the participant has, but the last one obviously givesthem 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; wecould write the following:

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WebQuest Tutorial

The �rst line contains the command telling WebQuest that we want a Likert scale, thenext line (the hyphen) tells WebQuest to use the default label options (more on thoselater), and the next line indicates how many options the scale has. The next lines (�vein this case) contain the options values, �Agree Strongly� to �Disagree Strongly�; the �rstline contains the left-hand option, and vice-versa across the screen. Immediately afterthe option-values comes the line containing the question. Do not leave any blank lines inamongst these lines, or WebQuest will get confused and the questions and answer textwill be jumbled up.

Note that the question is preceded by some text and three asterisks. This is the way youcan specify the variable name to be used for this question/answer as it appears in SPSSor 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 andExcel 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 toknow in what sports the participant was active, we'd want to allow them to select morethan one. We can use the ticklist command for answers like that:

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WebQuest Tutorial

Note that, unlike the other question types, the ticklist requires that the variable namesare applied to the answer-options instead of the questions. This is because the participantcan give more than one answer to ticklist questions, and each answer must be recordedseparately.

WARNING: A common mistake is to use a ticklist where the participant is expectedto pick only one option. In this case, the participant might change their mind aboutanswering �Yes� to a question, and go back and tick the �No� option without untickingthe �Yes�. In your results �le, it will appear that the participant answered both yes andno, 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:

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WebQuest Tutorial

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 likenow:

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WebQuest Tutorial

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

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WebQuest Tutorial

That'll teach you.

In order to catch that error, we obviously need to add more questions. Let's add somequestions that require a text answer:

3.10 textarea

For small entries like numbers or names, for instance, the textarea is most suitable. Itallows a label to be displayed alongside, which could be used to indicate the units (e.g.years) for the value to be entered:

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WebQuest Tutorial

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 ofthe box gives participants a hint as to what size of answer we're expecting. Note thatthe actual size is only an approximation due to the discrepancy between the fonts andbrowsers potentially used by participants.

The fourth line contains the label for the box, which is typically used to show the unitsfor the value. On the �fth line, the actual question appears. Finally, we insert a pagecommand to avoid seeing the error we had last time. The resultant web page looks asfollows.

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WebQuest Tutorial

3.11 Repeating Answers

Many questionnaires consist of a consecutive sequence of questions that share exactlythe same set of answer-options. For questions like this, WebQuest allows you to typethe questions without having to type the answer-options, thus saving a lot of time ande�ort. 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:

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WebQuest Tutorial

WebQuest repeats the answer options for each question under that command. The se-quence of questions ends with the next command; in this case, the page command.

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WebQuest Tutorial

3.12 Debrief

It is standard practice to end your survey with some concluding remarks, explaining to theparticipant the reasons for the survey, and thanking them for their contribution. You tellWebQuest where to end the survey (and start the debrief) with the command questionsend, which must occur immediately after a page command. No further commands areneeded (although you can use the page command if you want); the debrief will end withthe end of the question-�le. Thus:

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WebQuest Tutorial

Which gives the following result:

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WebQuest Tutorial

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webquest question-file quick-start instructions...

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