You can now load or create cascading questions in Surveys. This will take the enumerator down a path of choices to a final selection.
For example if you have a list of Districts, Towns and Villages, the user will first select a District and then see a list of Towns belonging only to that District, and then select a Village which is part of the selected Town.
Further questions in the survey can be made conditional on any part of the cascade. In analyses, any of the levels of the cascade can be used as filters or dimensions of analysis.
Use Cascading List Questions when you want to create the list only for your individual survey. This is for up to 1000 rows.
Use Cascading Reference Questions when you want to maintain one list that is shared across multiple surveys, and when you need to use many rows. For example the list of villages of a whole country, or a cascade of the programmes and projects of your organization.
Creating Cascading List Questions
Cascading questions are now a new survey question type available for all surveys. You can create the cascade either by loading a .xlsx spreadsheet file, or by manually entering values for the rows and columns. We recommend uploading a list for speed.
List upload
Follow these steps to create Cascading List Question the recommended way:
1) Create a list file in .xlsx (Excel) format. This needs to have column headers, one for each cascade level, and then entries for each row where each row represents a path through the cascade.
Note that in an import list there can be gaps in the data.
2) Create a Question in your survey of the type Cascading List Question
3) Import the file using the Upload XLSX Options File button in the question edit popup.
Note that if you re-import a list of options to a question it will overwrite the existing list and you risk losing existing data for that question. Please instead edit the list manually if you have already collected data. If the list has changed a lot, we recommend that you Disable the old cascade question to retain the data and then create a new one.
Manual creation
Alternatively for smaller sets of cascade data, you can manually. This can also be used to tweak lists that have been imported, for example if the options change over time.
1) Create a Cascading List Question in your Survey
2) Use the + Add Column and + Add Row buttons to add to the cascade list
3) Fill in each row to create a pathway through the cascade
Manual entry and editing of cascade lists
Note: For manually created rows you cannot have blanks in columns, but for imported lists you can.
Note: There is no built-in limit to the amount of columns and rows you can have in a cascading question. However, the larger the cascading list is, the bigger it makes the survey . At large row counts this may slow. mWater recommends a limit of up to 10,000 rows across 5 columns. For larger datasets, use shared cascade questions with caching rules.
Conditionality on cascade questions
You can make other questions in the survey conditional on what the enumerator selects in the cascade. This works similarly to conditionality, however:
1) You must use the + add advanced conditionality option to access the cascade list options.
Conditionality based on Cascading Question Lists
2) Take into account that each Option in a column is an enumerable. This means that if there is a village of the same name, for example Village A, in Township 1 and Township 2, then adding conditionality for a question to show when Village A is selected will show the question if either Township 1 -> Village A or Township 2 -> Village A is selected. If you want the question to onlyshow for Township 1 -> Village A, then you must build the conditionality to take both the District and the Village into account.
3) This also means that when you are selecting the advanced conditionality, the whole list of options for the column will show. Therefore please be careful in selecting a valid combination of conditions.
Creating Cascading Reference Questions
Cascading list questions are specific to individual surveys, but whenever you want to maintain a list that is used across multiple surveys, it is worth using a Cascading Reference Question. You can maintain an organization-wide list of Project Codes or a list of States, Districts, Towns, and Villages, for example, instead of managing them in each survey separately.
3) Select a Workspace or create a new one, making sure the Workspace permissions include the users you want to allow the cascading reference list for
4) Import the spreadsheet as a new table
5) In your survey, create a Cascading Reference Question and select the Table you've created
6) Add the Dropdowns you want to include from the table and label them
Important: You need to make sure that users who should access this cascading reference question are part of the table workspace permissions. If you deploy the survey to Group A but Group A does not have access to the table where the cascading reference question is, the members of the group will be able to fill out the survey but will not load the options of the cascading question. So be sure to check the table workspace permissions. You can make the workspace public if you are running an anonymous survey deployment.
You can import up to 10,000 rows of data freely into tables. In case you need more, please get in touch with mWater through info@mwater.co.
