Looping Overview

Looping is a feature that allows users to efficiently create a defined set of questions that are repeatedly “looped through” by respondents.  For example, a survey may ask respondents to specify the number of people in their household, and then for each household member, they are asked for the name, age, and gender.  This feature is efficient for survey designers, as the set of questions need be created only once.  For respondents, the Looping feature provides a helpful mechanism for viewing and editing what has already been entered by way of a “feedback table” with edit, delete and accept buttons.

Overview:

• Looping allows Survey Designers to define a single series of questions to be presented in a repeated fashion to the respondent.
• Looping is defined using a Loop object within the Survey Manager
• The object is placed in the survey in the location where the loop is to occur, and is defined through a combination of the creation of survey questions that comprise the loop, and the specifications of the Loop object as defined in the Loop editor.
• The object is a specialized form of a Collection, as it contains a group of questions with a logical relationship.

NOTE: Multi-Control Questions are not able to be used within Loops

Loops

There are three primary types of Loops:

• Iterate until done (aka “Open-Ended”):  With this type of looping, the respondent continues to iterate through the defined Illume questions that are part of the Loop either until the respondent decides no more loops need to occur, or until a maximum number of Loops has been reached, as defined on the Loop Iteration Guides tab.  This maximum can be hard coded, or can be based on the response to a question.  For example, Q1 in the survey may ask, “How many people are in your family?”  This value can be piped into the Maximum Allowed field to limit the number of Loops to the number entered into the Q1 field.

• Iterate for Each Entity in a Previous Loop (aka “Follow-up Loop”):  A Follow-up Loop allows the respondent to Loop through a series of questions in relation to a prior “parent” loop.  For example, a “parent” loop may ask the respondent to identify the Name and Gender of each member of their family.  Then, for each member of the family, the “Follow-up” loop may ask the respondent to answer several questions regarding the medications taken by each member of that family, or for a subset of the members of that family.

Selecting “Iterate for All entities in a previous loop” causes the respondent to be looped through the questions defined in the Follow-up loop for all family members defined in the Members loop.  Alternatively, the user may specify that only certain family members are asked the questions in the medication loop.  In this scenario, the users selects “Only iterate if…” and defines the conditions that specify for which members should the medication questions be asked (e.g. Only iterate if GENDER=male).  

• Iterate over a pre-defined set of response options (aka “Pre-defined loop”):  A Pre-defined loop allows the respondent to loop through a series of questions based on a predefined set of responses.    The Import from Question feature can be used in conjunction with this scenario, such that the scale from another question can be automatically imported, with show-if logic automatically applied to each option in the scale.  For Example this would ensure that the loop of questions regarding products only occurs for the products that were selected in the earlier question.

Loop Data

See Querying and Data in a Looping Survey for information on querying and downloading data from a survey that utilizes looping.