Create, Collect, and Analyze Surveys and Web Forms

Survey Software from WISCO Computing
WISCO Survey - Text Entry and Memo Questions

Text Entry and Memo text survey questions accept open ended responses. Open-ended questions are used when you can not determine ahead of time the number of possible responses to a survey question. Open-ended questions allow a survey respondent provide additional detailed information that may not be covered by the survey questions. Open-ended questions typically take more time for the respondent to complete, and for human interpretation of the completed responses.

WISCO Survey includes three hybrid question types (3, 15,and 18) allowing some predetermined choices plus an option for 'Other' text responses. Two other question types offer controlled text entry solutions. The Text Group question type allows up to 5 text response allows up to 30 characters. The Name/Address Information question type includes 9 text entry fields with an optional extra information field.

Create Survey Question

A text response is entered for this question type. Up to 240 characters can be allowed. The default length is 40 characters. The minimum length can be 1 character. Since the total length of all responses to all questions is limited to 4000 characters in the main DBF response file, you should be able to use lengths less than the default length for some of your survey questions.

  1. Enter survey question text.
  2. Choose question type 11 Text Entry.
  3. Click the Options/Values tab.
  4. With the spinner, set the number to the maximum number of characters to reserve.
  5. Enter Question Topic.

There is no limit on the length of a memo text entry. The main DBF response file only uses 10 characters to create an internal index to keep track of the memo location in the second DBT response file. However, one limitation of the memo text entry is that the memo text can not be included in some analyses.

Collect Survey Responses

text entry edit box

If your survey question expects a short response, the length of the response should be set to a lower number of characters

Analyze Survey Responses

The number displayed next to the Maximum Number of Text Responses spinner determines how many (up to 100) of the most common text responses are listed when a Text Response question is analyzed. To list all responses use the Analysis Menu - Text Responses selection. If the number of responses exceed the spinner number, the remaining responses are grouped as Other.

Memos are not analyzed for All Questions, Single Question, Filtered, and Keyword Analysis reports. Complete texts from memo responses can be included with reports from the Analysis Menu - Text Responses selection.

Filtered Analysis

A Filtered analysis of a text entry question requires text to be entered in the edit box. If the text in the edit box matches any portion of the response text, it is considered a match. The program converts the text in the edit box to upper case for comparisons. If DOG is entered in the edit box, it will match all forms of the word (Dog, dog, DOG, etc).

The six extra fields can be added to each set of survey responses are also text entry type questions. This text can also be entered when recording responses from a paper survey, revising the current database, and importing records into the database. Of course, if these fields are not included in the database, they are not available for analysis. The checkbox on the Preferences Menu selection - Survey Titles/Headings must be checked so these fields are included in the survey response database. The six extra fields are the Email User name, Email Address, Email User IP, and 3 User Codes.

For example, if @ibm.com was entered for the matching email address field, any survey with @ibm.com would be included in the question calculations. Your results would show how only those respondents with @ibm.com in their email address answered the survey questions.

Memos can not be included in filtered analysis reports.