Piping is transferring an answer to a question, given by a respondent, to another question. You can literally repeat an answer in the question text of the question that receives the answer. If the origination question was 'which car brand do you own?' and the respondent gave the answer 'Ford', you can use this value in the question text of subsequent questions, for instance by asking: 'Are you satisfied with your Ford?'.
Only questions where a respondent can define just one singe answer are suitable to act as the origin of a piping question. Hence, only the open question and the multiple choice question can be used as an origin for piping. In the following table you can see which question types can serve as an originating question for a piping question and which types can serve as a receiving question.
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Question
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Originating
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Receiving
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Open question
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X
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X
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Comment question
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X
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Multiple choice question
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X
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X
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Multiple response question
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X
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Matrix question
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X
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Scale question
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X
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Multiple steps question
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X
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Priority question
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X
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Figure 16: supported questions for piping.
You can define the receiving piping question, by clicking on the checkbox Pipe from in the properties menu of that question. A drop down box will appear where you can select the question number of the question that should be the originating piping question. Only the open questions and multiple choice questions will be shown in the drop down list, since these are the only supported originating questions for piping.
In the receving question you can place four dots (....) in the place where you would like the originating value to be inserted in the question text. In the survey process, the software will replace the four dots with the value the respondent gave in the originating question. An example of an interactive piping construction is shown in the figure below.
Figure 17: An interactive piping construction
Please note in this example that if a user answers that the first question is 'not applicable', the receiving question will be automatically be skipped in the survey process.