Array of Checkboxes in LimeSurvey
Posted by Peter | Filed under Software
I’m using LimeSurvey to setup and conduct a survey as part of my PhD, and it’s working very well. (Great work, LimeSurvey developers!) It’s free and open source, and since I have my own server I can host the survey myself at no additional expense (which wouldn’t be the case if I used something like SurveyMonkey).
However, after discussion with a very helpful statistics guru here at UWS, I found that I needed a question type LimeSurvey didn’t seem to support: an array of checkboxes.
Here’s the kind of question I was hoping to display:
Q: Which of these features have you used as a student and/or as a teacher?
Student Teacher
1. Forum [] []
2. Chatroom [] []
3. Wiki [] []
4. Quiz [] []
It’s like the “array” question type, but each [] is a checkbox (instead of a radio button), so I’m basically tracking two independent boolean variables for each category, instead of a single variable on a scale.
After some very helpful (and very prompt) support on the LimeSurvey forums, it turns out that this question type is possible, but I had to upgrade to LimeSurvey v1.81. (I had previously been running v1.72). With the new version, here’s how it’s done:
- Create a label set for your columns of checkboxes
- Add a new question (fill in the usual Code and Question boxes)
- For Question Type, select “Array (Multi Flexible) (Numbers)
- Select the label set you created above
- Under Question Attributes, select “Checkbox layout”, and enter 1 in the box besides it
- Click “Add question”
And that’s it! It’s not immediately obvious at first, but pretty easy once you know how. You might find that the checkboxes take up a lot of room if you only have a few. For 2 columns of checkboxes, I found that an “answer_width” of 50 (under the question attributes) made the layout a little better.
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