Relevance

What is Relevance

In surveys we don't "skip to another question" instead we check to see if a
question is "relevant" before it is asked.

If the question is not relevant then it will not be asked hence it will have
been skipped.

The rules that determine relevance of a question are specified in the column
labelled "relevant" in the survey worksheet.

In the following example the weight and length questions are only relevant if the age is less than or equal to 5 years

Example

If Selected

Often a question is relevant if a specific choice has been selected in a select question. You can test for that using the selected function:

selected ( ${question_name},  'choice name' )

Note

The single quotation marks around the choice name are required. This is because the answer to select questions is always a text value. So even if your choice names have been specified as numbers; 1, 2, 3 the selected value will be considered text '1', '2', '3'.

Actually sometimes you can just use = instead of selected(). If the select question you are referring to is of type select_one then you could have written the above:

${question_name} = 'choice name'

Using = will not work with select_multiple. For this reason it is common to always use the selected() function for consistency and to prevent problems that could happen if a select_one was changed to a select_multiple without updating relevance.

Other Questions

A very common usage of relevance is to show a text question asking the user to "Please specify" what they mean't by selecting Other in a choice list.

An Other Question

We can use fhe selected functions as shown below

Relevance for other

More Complex Expressions

Expressions can be built up using "and" and "or". For example:

${age} < 10 and ${gender} = 'female'
selected(${q}, 'choice1') or selected($q}, 'choice2')

For more information refer to Expressions