When you use inheritance, answers from a previous question are transferred to following questions. Which answers are inherited depends on what the respondent has filled out at the originating question. Inheritance is a very powerfull interactive feature that allows you to 'zoom in' on specific issues, without asking questions that don't make sense to the respondent. The originating question for inheritance can only be of the multiple response type. You can find the supported receiving question types in the table below.
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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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Comment question
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Multiple choice question
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X
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Multiple response question
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X
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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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Priority question
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X
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Figure 21: supported questions for inheritance.
A good example of a situation where you can use inheritance is when you want to ask a respondent which websites he or she knows and subsequently you want to ask the respondent his or her opinion on those websites. It wouldn't make sense to ask respondents their opinion on specific websites if they have never visited those sites. You can solve this by using inheritance.
In this specific case you would first define a multiple response question that asks respondents which sites they have visited. After this question, you can define a scale question where the respondents can give their opinion on the sites that they have visited. Next, you can define that the scale question positively inherits the answers the respondents checked in the previous multiple response question. The respondents now only have to rate the sites they know about.
A question can positively or negatively inherit answers from a multiple response question. When the inheritance is positive, only the categories that the respondent checked will be shown in the receiving inheritance quesion. When inheritance is negative, only the categories that the respondent did not check will be shown in the receiving inheritance question. In the above example, if you use negative inheritance, you could ask why respondents didn't visit the other sites.
In order to define an inheritance question, you check the check box Inherit from in the question properties of the receiving question. A drop down menu will appear on the right side of the 'Inherit from' check box. This drop down menu contains the question numbers of all the preceeding multiple response questions. You can select the originating question you want the receiving question to inherit from.
After you select the question number to inherit from you see all the answers of the originating question appear as answer categories of the receiving question. These categories are shown in a light grey color to indicate that they are not editable. If you want to edit the categories, you should do this in the originating question. Changes made there are also directly reflected in the receiving questions.
Just to the right of the drop down box there is an icon that shows if the inheritance is positive or negative. This is shown by a + (positive) or a - (negative) symbol. The default value is positive. To change the value just click on the symbol.
Besides inheriting categories directly from an originating question, it is also possible to add new categories to these inherited categories. The new categories will always be shown to the respondent.
Figure 22: An interactive inheritance construction.
The inheritance feature is implemented with built in intelligence that makes the software flexible to use and avoids situations that are not logical to the respondent:
- You can use the category 'other' in the originating question. Whatever the respondent fills out in this field is repeated in associated positive inheritance questions.
- If a respondent checks no category at all in the originating question, the associated positive inheritance questions are skipped automatically.
- You can define 'multiple inheritance' dialogues. This means that a receiving inheritance question (only of the multiple response type) can act as an originating inheritance question
- You can use the same multiple response question several times for different receiving inheritance questions.