Dear all,

I searched the forum for "pretest" which is (should be) a hot topic in survey research, but did not find what I looked for (I use Limesurvey 2.6.4-lts):

Short version:
I think of a function/plugin that simply(?) adds a text input below every question automatically (named like the question, e.g. question01 -> question01pre) and one checkbox in the admin interface, that puts the survey into "pretest mode".

Is there a way, a plugin to do this? I think this would be an absolutely great feature to have. (Hope I did not overlook this in the newer versions - I still use 2.6.4 lts)


Thanks for any hints and for your time!
Best, G


-> And now the long version, with some more information, but the same conclusions

I created a survey and now want/have to pretest it to make sure that it not just works for me, but also for my respondents There are lots of ways to pretest a survey - the focus here is on the clarity and comprehensibility of the questions, the completeness of categories and the convenience of filling in the questionnaire.

One way to do this is to tell the respondents to answer the questions and take notes about "bad" things in the questionnaire and to offer a text field in the end of the survey to note these things. This is not the best way, since the respondents have to memorize these things to note them in the end. For the researchers it is then tedious to find the according questions to these notes.

A much better way would be text fields next to every single question, that make the pretest easy for the respondents and also for the researchers. Now we could manually add text inputs to every single question, etc., but this can be 1) a lot of work and 2) problematic if you want to show only one question per page.

I'm looking for a pretest mode that adds a text input to every single question. A survey tool that seems to provide this functionality is www.soscisurvey.de/help/doku.php/en:survey:pretest

I think of a function/plugin that simply(?) adds a text input below every question automatically (named like the question, e.g. question01 -> question01pre) and one checkbox in the admin interface, that puts the survey into pretest mode.

Is there a way, a plugin to do this? I think this would be an absolutely great feature to have. (Hope I did not overlook this in the newer versions - I still use 2.6.4 lts)

Again: Thanks for any hints and for your time!
Best, G

it's on our todo list

Thanks for your reply @LouisGac!

I guess that's the following feature request by @jelo: bugs.limesurvey.org/view.php?id=7407 (Test and Comment Modus), right? Does not seem to be as much demanded as I thought :-)

I would definitely support a little "lighter" version of this request:

• a plugin that adds a text input to every question in a survey and saves the input in a similar named variable, like "question01P".
• The remarks would not have to be displayed next to the question in the editor, but "just" be saved in the dataset with the answers and thus displayed in the data view and in the exported dataset (I think that the latter is a better solution than creating an extra list of annotations sorted by question (which some other programs provide) and does not require greater changes at the admin interface).
• When the pretest mode is "switched off" (and maybe a button is pressed) the columns with the annotations would get deleted from the database.
• After editing the questionnaire the survey can be set to pretest mode again (with new variables for the annotations according to the current list of questions
• Notes: Refinements (e.g. choose questions to pretest, check name length before adding a "P", etc.) are nice, but not necessary in the first place. I see a problem with this approach of added questions in the "question by question" mode, but maybe this can be solved somehow elegantly

Should I file this as a feature request? Anybody interested to work on a plugin that works from Version 2.6.4-lts on? Any estimations of how much effort this is? I'd really appreciate that. I think this feature would be extremely helpful for developing and testing questionnaires.

Thanks and all the best, G