Randomizing select and select1 options

Development
7

Hi Raghu,

Attached is an old sample form of ours that demonstrates the basic
technique: you repeat your choices x times, in x different orderings, and
then you use a choice filter to only show the randomly-selected ordering.
It's laborious in that it requires a bunch of permutations, but you can do
something similar with a pre-loaded .csv file and it can be pretty quick
and easy once you're familiar with the technique.

I'm still having a hard time figuring out how many of our potential users
might see value in a simpler method, provided that they can't know what the
order was ex post.

One implementation approach could store the ordering somehow in the data. I
suppose that that approach could work whether it was an attribute or an
appearance, but then an appearance would seem less suitable (since the
response data would be encoded differently). If the response data were
changing format somehow, an attribute or even a different field type would
seem in order (pun intended).

Best,

Chris

SampleRandomizedChoiceForm.xlsx (52.9 KB)

ยทยทยท On Thu, Apr 7, 2016 at 8:31 AM Raghu Mittal wrote:

Hi Martijn,

We have implemented this randomization of options within our own fork of
ODK Collect and we wouldn't mind contributing it back to the ODK Repo.
Some points regarding our implementation:

  1. We did not need to record the sequence of options shown to the user.
    The only requirement was to randomize the options so that there is no bias
    on the part of the user to make a choice. In fact, the way the widget works
    is that every time you swipe to the same question, it shows a different
    order of options, even when an answer has already been selected.
  2. We used a separate attribute called 'random' to make it work. Of
    course, given the +/- points you have listed, it seems that going the
    attribute way seems to be the best.
  3. All options are indeed randomized, so if we have 'other', 'none' etc.
    they will not be put at the bottom.

Chris, what you say is interesting, regarding randomizing using
cascading-select. But I didn't get how this will work. Can you explain? Or
maybe, just send me a link to the sample form you were mentioning and I
could try that out.

Thanks,
Raghu

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