Routing is defining a path through the questionnaire based on input given by the respondent. A 'path' can only originate at a multiple choice question. Every question can be a receiving question. Underneath the table of supported questions for routing is shown.
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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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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 18: supported questions for routing.
In order to define a path, you check the checkbox Routing in the question properties of the multiple choice question that has to become the origin of the routing. The MDD will show a drop down menu for all the answers that you have defined for the multiple choice question. The dropdown boxes contain all the question numbers in the dialogue that follow the current question. You can not route to an earlier question. For each answer you can now specify which question should be the next question, if the respondent chooses this answer. Figure 19 shows an example of an interactive routing construction.
Figure 19: An interactive routing construction.
A special case of routing is the Jump to possibility. With this feature you can define that a respondent should jump to a specific question regardless of which answer the respondent has given. The jump to can be specified for every question type, not just a multiple choice question. You specify a jump at the originating question. In the question properties there is a Jump to value with a drop down box. This has the default value Next (since normally a user should continue with the next question in the dialogue). Here you can set a specific question number or the value End (in case you want the respondent to jump to the end of the survey.
Using this feature might not look very logical at first sight, for it seems that each respondent skips the same set of questions when the jump to feature is used. You could reason that leaving these skipped questions out of the survey might have the same result. It is only in combination with the routing functionality that the jump to feature is usefull. To explain this, an example follows
Suppose that you want to aks respondents if they have a car. If they do, you want to ask them which brand of car they have. If they don't have a car, you want to ask them why. This example is shown in figure 20.
Figure 20: A combination of routing and 'jump to' creates different legs is a survey.
With the routing functionality you can route respondents who have a car to question 2 and respondents that don't have a car to question 3. Without jumping, respondents that have a car will continue with question 3 after having answered question 2. Question 3 is the wrong question for those respondents. You can solve this by defining that regardless of what people answer in question 2, they should jump to question 4. With the 'jump to' functionality you can create different legs in a survey.