Page randomisation disturbs normal flow of a sequence of choice experiments

Unclassified & General
1

Hi,

I have a survey with 3 different choice experiments:

  • CE_A and CE_B that are allocated to group 1 of participants (after a filter question). Participants first go through a page of explanation about CE_A + CE_A and then through a page of explanation about CE_B and then CE_B (CE_A and CE_B both comprises 15 choice sets so I have made 3 blocks of 5 choice set in each CE.

  • CE_C that is allocated to group 2 of participants (after the same filter question as previous). CE_C comprises 9 choice sets. I made no blocks.

So far, everything goes fine. But when I select the CE pages (for all 3 CEs) for randomisation and for them to be presented in different order to participants, I face a few problems:

  • I get 5 choice sets for CE_A but only one for CE_B when I should be getting 5 for each of them
  • I get a random number of choice sets for CE_C instead of 9
  • Choice sets are mixed up and choice sets from CE_C can appear in CE_A or CE_B

Do you know how I could fix the problem?

Best wishes,

Carla

2

This is difficult to answer without seeing your survey. Let’s first establish what you are trying to achieve. Is the following correct?

  1. The respondent answers a filter question. Based on the answer, they will be sorted into group 1 or 2. Group 1 answers choice experiments A and B (and not C), group2 answers choice experiment C (and neither A nor B).
  2. A respondent in group 1 answers one block of 5 choice tasks from experiment A and one block of 5 choice tasks from experiment B - 10 choice tasks in total.
  3. A respondent in group 2 answers all 9 choice tasks from experiment C.

Now a few questions:

  1. Apparently, you would like to randomise the order of choice questions. Am I right to assume that you have one choice task per page? It seems that you have put all pages with choice tasks into one randomisation group. Based on what I know, it would seem more appropriate to create one randomisation group per choice experiments in order to shuffle the pages for experiment A among each other, then the pages for experiment B among each other and the pages for experiment C among each other. Maybe this would already fix your problem.
  2. Otherwise, how do you achieve the separation into group 1 and 2? Do you use a branch? Do you also uses branches to join everyone back together for the remainder of the survey? Are the branch elements on the same page as choice tasks? What happens if you put the branches onto separate pages?
  3. How do assign the blocks and how do you select the design rows for the individual blocks?