CSAQ: Current Status

Current Status of Project on Navigation of CSAQs

Whole/Part/Index. We are currently running participants from the University of Maryland Department of Psychology Subjects Pool. The software now records for verification the data from the survey as well as the completion times for initially filling out the questionnaire and for two sets of data re-entry (edits, one by item number and the other by item topic).
From Records to Questionnaire. We are designing a second experiment in which subjects will be given a booklet of information on an organization and asked to complete a questionnaire for that organization. The organization is a student club.
The booklet is organized into the following sections:
- Officers (names, short biographies, position statements for election, budgets)
- Members (names, addresses, academic major, contributions, participation)
- Committees (names, purpose, activities, budgets)
- Events (names, dates, expenses, participation)
The questionnaire, on the other hand, will be organized into the following sections:
- Finances (e.g., What is the budget for advertizing? How much did a fund raiser bring in?)
- Counts (e.g., How many members are there? How many events were sponsored?)
- Positions (e.g., How sports oriented is this organization? Are the officers progressive?)
- Facts (e.g., When are elections held? Does the organization have a savings account?)
We will use the navigation method the proves most successful from the first study as the design for the survey. We will then run an initial group of 20 subjects to observe patterns of completing the questonnaire.
Linear Versus Tabular Forms. Linear presentations of items help to control the flow responses but have the disadvantages of taking up a lot of screen space and limiting cross item comparisons. We are currently developing a list of the congitive issues and trade-offs between linear and tabular forms and developing some prototype questionnaires.
Conditional Jumps. We are currently looking at manual versus auto-jump techniques and their implications for design and navigation on the WWW. Surveys vary in the number of intervening questions that are skipped and whether the respondent has an opportunity to see those items.
Preliminary Conditional Jump Surveys.