Drupal Deepsurvey module

Deep Survey is a module which aims to turn Drupal into a market and social research surveying tool. It allows privileged users to add surveys to a site. These surveys consist of questions which then in turn consist of answer lists - both of these are separate content types. Other Drupal users may complete the surveys, being asked one question after another and responding via the answer lists.

The concept behind survey is that there are a number of Drupal content types (currently four, more will be added later) which are combined to form a survey. The “deep survey” content type is the basis of the survey and the one which sites users will be directed to so they can complete the survey. The question content type defines the questions which will be asked in the survey, one instance of this type for each question. The same question can appear in multiple surveys. The Answer List type defines the possible answers to the questions and again can appear in multiple questions, and multiple Answer Lists can appear in one question. There are various attributes associated with the relationships between these content types which determine how they appear in the survey – for instance the answers in an Answer list can be displayed in a random order or in the original order that they were created in in the answer list for a particular question. The fourth content type is a Skip which can appear in a survey and allows later questions to be skipped based upon the responses the user completing the survey has made to previous survey questions.

Creating a survey

To create a new survey first select “Deep Survey” under create content as with any other content type. There are a couple of extra options here. If “Backwards navigation” is checked then survey respondents will be able to go backwards and forwards through the survey until they have finished, otherwise once they have filled in a question they will not be able to go back to it. The “Availability options” define when the survey will be available to the respondent.

Deep Survey

Deep Survey Question

Deep Survey Answer ListDeep Survey Skip

The “Deep survey question”, “Deep survey skip” and “Deep survey answer list” types can be created from the “create content” menu but can also be created from within a survey in the “Deep Survey Management” menu under Administration.

“Deep survey management” in the administer menu will list the surveys that have been created and allow data to be downloaded as a CSV file or be cleared. In order to add questions to a survey it must be selected via the menu or by clicking on the title in the list of surveys.

Once a survey has been selected the options will be to add a new item to the survey or add existing items:

When adding a new item the user creating the survey (the researcher) will be given the option of which type of item to add, however only the question and skip types are currently available:

When creating a new question the extra options are:

The Question – This is the text that will appear on the page when this question is displayed in the survey.Instruction – This text will appear in italics under “The Question”.

Minimum/Maximum responses on the X/Y axis – These define how many items may be selected or responded too on answer lists displayed horizontally and vertically (i.e. The X and Y axis). If nothing is entered here any number may be selected, however single response answer lists may still only have one answer.

Once this question has been saved it will appear in the survey administration screen as follows:

Extra questions can be added to the survey using the “add a new item...” or “existing items...” links depending upon where the item(s) should appear. The order of the questions determines the order in which they are displayed in the survey.

I have added some more questions:

To remove a question from the survey check the box in the “Remove” column, to reorder a question enter the desired order of the question in the text box in the “Reorder” column as shown. These actions are enabled by clicking on the button marked “Done”.

Answer lists are added to the questions by clicking the link marked “edit”. This displays a screen similar to the previous one which allows new or existing answer list to be added to the question.

As with the survey itself you have the option of adding a new answer list or existing answer lists to the question. When a new answer list is added a confirmation screen will appear which, if “Yes” is selected, will display the form for creating the content type of “answer list”. This form does not contain any custom fields.

Once this has been done the answer list will appear in the question admin page in the same way the question appears in the survey admin page:

There are however some extra options for the answer list that may be chosen here, as follows:

Display Order: “Normal” means that the possible answers will be displayed in the order they appear in the answer list, “Randomised” means they will appear in a random order and “Rotated” means each successive respondent will see the list in the normal order but with the answer at the start of the list moved to the bottom each time.

Unique Item: This modifies the Display Order value, “undifferentiated” means that the display order of the first item on the axis will be used and “unique” means that the display order for this answer list will be used, and the randomisation or rotation will only take place within this list rather than across the entire axis.

Axis: The possible values are “X-axis” which means the answers will be displayed down the page, “Y-axis” which means the responses will be displayed across the screen and “drop-down” which means they will be displayed in a drop-down box. If there is both X and Y axis answer lists then they will display in a grid.

Response type: The possible values are “single” which means only one answer can be selected, “multi” which means multiple answers may be selected, “text” which means a text response may

be typed in for each item in the answer list and “numeric” which means a number may be entered for each item in the answer list.

Select “edit” link to add items to the answer list.

Click on “add new answers to the start of the answer list” to add up to twenty new answers. If more than twenty are required then the process must be repeated.

The “Answer Text” will appear on the screen and the “Code” is a numeric identifier associated with that answer. The code value must be unique within an axis. These answers will appear in the answer list once the “Done” button is clicked.

The answers may be reordered, removed or new answers added using the controls provided as previously described for other deep survey content types.

Example questions

The questions in the example survey will display as follows.

Question 1:

Second question:

which will display thus:

Third question:

Which will display as:

Adding a skip to a survey

The “Deep survey skip” content type can be added into a survey in the same way as a question and consists of a series of rules which are defined by the user creating the survey. When the user filling in the survey reaches the point where the skip is located the rules are evaluated one by one in order to determine which of the remaining questions in a the survey the respondent will advance to.

Each rule consist of a previous survey question (Skip When Item), an operator (which can be “equal”, “less than” or “greater than”) and a value for row code, column code, drop down code and text/numeric response. Finally each rule has a target question which is the question to which the survey will advance when that rule is triggered (Skip to Item).

A rule is triggered when code for the response to the Skip When Item is equal to, greater then or less than (depending upon the operator value) the latest code value given (e.g. if the row code, column code and drop down code is defined in the rule then it is the drop down code that is compared, if only the row code and column code are defined then it is the column code). Any text/numeric response is compared directly against the text or numeric response values in the skip (if entered). The previous code values, if selected as anything other than “any”, will define which specific rows or columns the response must be in to trigger the rule. If no rules are triggered the survey continues on to the next question after the skip.

The skip is created as a “Deep survey skip” node in Drupal in the same way as a survey question is and rules can be added to a skip within the “Deep Survey Management” menu. This is done as follows.

Firstly from the survey screen click the “add new item ...” link for the order you want the skip to be in. For example from this screen the “add a new item here” link on the second question will be clicked.

Which will display the following screen, where “deep survey skip” is selected from the drop down box and the the “Done” button clicked:

After that the screen to create a new Deep Survey Skip node is displayed. A name for the skip should be entered and a description if necessary.

Once the save button is clicked the skip will appear in the survey.

In order to add the skip rules the “edit” link for the skip is clicked, which will display the following screen.

Here again the “add new rules ...” links are used to add new rules to the skip, up to nineteen at a time using the following screen.

When a “Skip When Item” is selected then the possible responses for most of the rest of the columns will be populated. Here as “Example Question 1” is a set of drop down boxes arranged in a grid of columns and rows all three of the “Row Code”, “Column Code” and “Drop Down Code” responses are available. This rule as displayed will trigger when “Man” is selected as the response in the red row of the angry column in that question and the survey will skip forward to “Example question 4”. It is possible to define multiple rules for one question in the same skip.

As “Example question 2” only has a single row of responses then only the “Row Code” is available. This rule would trigger when any response to a text or numeric item was over 4. Once “Done” has been clicked the rules are added to the skip and they are displayed as follows.

More rules can be added before or after these rules. They can be edited, removed or reordered from this screen as with other deep survey node types. The rules are evaluated in the order given and the question that is skipped to is the one given in the first rule that is triggered.