Creating Consistent Order Randomisation

Web Survey Creator allows you to pick consistent randomisation as one of the options when you turn on randomisation.

It sounds strange, but “consistent randomisation” can be important in a survey. If you are asking multiple questions about a series of products, you may want the products to be randomised in the same way for every question. This is consistent randomisation.

How Do I Enable Consistent Randomisation?

You can use the following steps to enable consistent randomisation on your questions in Web Survey Creator:

1. Navigate to Design --> Content on your survey and Click the Edit button on your chosen question.

2. Scroll down to your Selection Choices and click the “How do you want the choices sorted" dropdown. Select the option "Randomize Order of Choices (Consistent Order). By default - this will not apply any sorting or randomisation.

Maintaining Consistent Item Amounts

It is important to know that for consistent order randomisation to work, you must ensure that you have the same number of items in the questions that you want to consistently randomise. For example:

Let's say want to apply “Randomize order of choices (Consistent Order)” to two questions, a Single Choice question and a Single Choice Matrix question. Here are our two questions:

The two questions above present a problem. When using consistent order randomisation, our choice question “What is your favourite fruit?” has 5 items, whilst our Matrix question has 4 row items.

Having a different amount of items in your questions cannot be consistent.

So how can we still keep our consistent order randomisation without wanting to add the “None of the above” row in our Matrix question? As this would not make sense in the Matrix question.

The solution is to add the “None of the above” row to your Matrix, but HIDE the question from the respondent. To achieve this, you can follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Design --> Content on your survey and Click the Edit on your Matrix question.

2. Scroll down to your question rows and click the option “Add New Row”.

3. Now while configuring the new row, ensure that you have “Question Rows(s) will be Hidden from Respondents” selected in the dropdown option.

By having the option “Question Rows(s) will be Hidden from Respondents” selected in the dropdown, you can keep the number of items in your questions consistent whilst preventing the respondent from seeing the additional row in your survey.