Hi,

I want to make some questions mandatory in my survey. But I soon discovered how annoying making the questions mandatory to participants can be when I was testing my survey, and if I missed a question, it wont let me move on-reading the same messages over and over again.

I do not want my participants to get annoyed and exit the survey, making my response rate low. My questions are:
1) if I choose to make my questions mandatory, is there a way that if the participant decides not to answer the question, they can just move forward?

2) if I do not make my questions mandatory, is there a pop up message I can insert into limesurvey which will read "We noticed that you did not respond to all the questions, if this was your intention, click next to move forward" or something like that.

Are either of these options available on LimeSurvey?

Thanks
Nkem.

If you let people move on without answering the question is NOT mandatory.

Hi,
Thank you for your response. I know if I dont set the questions as mandatory, my participants do not have to respond to every question. But is there another way apart from the mandatory setting to make sure my participants respond to all my questions?

No, I don't see any chance. Either they don't have to fill them out, then they can move on without filling them out. Or they are mandatory and then they can't move on without answering.

Do you have all questions on one page? Sounds like it. Because if you go for the question by question setting the mandatory questions are usually no big deal and it is easy to see what is missing.

I know where the mandatory setting is. I just wanted to know if LimeSurvey was not limited just to that. My survey have over 300 questions, and I was thinking of making the crucial section mandatory-but having it partial mandatory. So what you are saying is that this is very black or white-I either set my questions as mandatory or not.

Hi Nkemlku,

A question can either be mandatory, then they have to fill it out in order to proceed.
Or it is not mandatory, then they fill it out or not.

To be honest, in this case I don't see any grey zone. It is either black, or it is white. Or do you see a way how it could be "a little bit mandatory"?

But of course not all questions of a questionnaire need to be mandatory.

I don't see how you would be able to make a question "partially mandatory".

What you could do (and I think there exist examples in the forum) is to give a warning if the question hasn't been filled out. But this would mean some custom JavaScript I think.

How can I create that message. I am not familiar with javascripts, but I will learn if you point me in the right direction.

I don't know how to do this, but I haven seen in the forum explications for similar approaches.

Have a look around in the forum among the responses of tpartner. I know it isn't easy to search, but I don't have more information.

Maybe you can also find something in the workaround section.

Maybe this here can help:
docs.limesurvey.org/tiki-index.php?page=...m_response_listeners

The statement "if you let people move on without answering the question is NOT mandatory" is not accurate. There is a "mandatory answer" required to proceed with the survey and a "mandatory answer" required for completion of the survey. We would like a question that is mandatory for completion of the survey while not hindering the progression of the survey.

As an example:

I'm on the train after doing a course and I want to leave feedback via a LimeSurvey. The survey asks for my course ID - I don't have that info on hand, but I have time to fill out the survey, save it and I'll get the course ID later. I forget and press "Submit" when I'm finished with the survey and it says "This mandatory question must be answered: Course ID"

PLeitch wrote: There is a "mandatory answer" required to proceed with the survey and a "mandatory answer" required for completion of the survey. We would like a question that is mandatory for completion of the survey while not hindering the progression of the survey.

There are three LimeSurveys depending on the way the questions are displayed (all-in-one, question by question and group by group). If the answer of a question is not needed to control the surveyflow, you can create your own mandatory check routine one question(group) before the submit-button occurs.

But, in this case I don't think it will work without tokens and token based answer persistence. Because how long do you want to keep the session open for this survey? So you need some kind of identifier.

Maybe the "save and continue later" function might also be an option to save the current state of the survey, but as I never used this feature, I am not quite sure how it exactly will work in practice.