WWW.perfectsurveys.com offers one of the most sophesticated Randomization mechanims in the Online Survey Applicaiton industry for minimizing Question Order Effects. Depending upon your requirements a variety of Randomization features and techniques are used. In this tutorial different techniques and methods of Randomization will be illustrated with examples.

Example 1: I want to randomly choose one question from my survey and display it to the user. Further more, I want to divide my survey into three(or any number) of sections and choose one question from each section and display it to my respondents.

Solution :

1. Create all the different questions that you need. Do not worry about ordering the questions since only one of them will be randomly picked.
2. Then go to the Survey Options tab on the main menu bar.
3. Find the Randomization box on the lower right portion of the screen.
4. Click on the Randomly Select One Question option.
   
   

   Randomization

   Randomize All Questions in The Survey Randomly Select One Question

   
   
   
5. This will Instruct the survey to randomly choose one question out of the survey and display it
6. Now to divide the Survey into 3 (Or more sections).
7. On the EditSurvey icon in the survey builder, scroll down to the Last Question of each of the sections and add a Page Break there. A Page Break is nothing buy a Branch to the next question.
8. You can add a page break by clicking on the Icon on the Question.

Example 2: I want to randomize the order in which the questions get displayed. I have an initial welcome question and then three sets of questions (each with N questions) -- I would like to randomize the order in which each of the question sets gets displayed.
Note, the order of the questions within each Question Set must be in order.

Solution :

1. Create all the Questions that you would need.
2. Make sure that your initial welcome questions is the first question in the Survey
3. Create Page Breaks on the following locations:

• First Question
• Last Question of the first question set
• Last Question of the second question set and so on ...

1. Then goto the Survey Options tab.
2. Find the Randomization box on the lower right portion of the screen.
3. Click on the Randomize All Questions In the Survey Option.
   
   

   Randomization

   Randomize All Questions in The Survey Randomly Select One Question

   
   
   
4. This will enable Randomization in each "Section" -- A Section is defined as a list of questions between two branch points
5. If you need a "Thank You Text Quesion" at the End of the survey create a Single question at the end after the last question set.
6. Make sure you enable a Page Break after the last question in the question set to the "Thank You " question or else your "Thank You" question will also be included in the randomization and might not be in the End.

Example 3: Now let take this to the next level and impose one more restriction on the above two problem statements. In both cases we had 3 Question Sets that we either choose (1 of N) or we randomized the questions order. Now we want to randomly pick only one of these question blocs and display it to the respondent.

Solution :

1. Here is where we introduce the Random Question Type
2. Go ahead and create the survey and setup the randomization as described in Example 1 or Example 2 which ever is the case
3. Please have a "Text Only" Quesiton before each question bloc (Maybe explaining what the next question bloc is all about )
4. After this is done click on the "Random" link under the "Survey Display Options" box on the EditSurvey tab (left side bottom table).
5. Here choose the first questions of each of the question blocs. ie the TextOnly questions that you added at the head of each of the question blocks
6. You should have (in our case) three items to randomize here -- The first questions of each of the three question blocks
7. After that close the Randomizer window
8. Now you should see a new "Randomizer" question added to your survey.
9. Make sure that the Randomizer is before the questions it randomizes.
10. If you added the questions into the randomizer in ascending order then it's location is auomatically set to be before the first question it randomizes.
11. Now go ahead and create a Page Break on the "Text Only" question to branch to the next question. This will enable the Engine to Jump to the question and then Randomize the Block.
12. You are done!