Confused about multiple response data

[Starbozeman07]

Hi,

I just ran a pretest on a questionnaire. It had both pre and posttest variable. I had some questions labeled multi 1, multi2, multi3 etc. The results appear very strange in the Excel spread sheet. There are multiple responses for multi 1 such as multi 01 1, multi 01 2 multi 01 3. In each box, there is only a 0 or one response. The questions in these section had 5 choices. My question is, which response is the correct data entered from each student? Why are there multiple Excel columns for each question. I would appreciate if you could respond to my question.

[jarvis24]

Sounds like they are multiple response items. MR items generate one variable for each option because, by default, subjects can pick more than one response option. Consequently, the way you can know which options were picked is to have MediaLab create one variable for each option--using a value of "1" if the option was chosen, and of "0" if the option was not chosen.

Note that you can limit MR items to a single response, using a range parameter indicating a minimum and maximum of 1 option to be selected, e.g., (p5,r1-1) for a 5 option MR item. That would result in a single variable that would simply indicate which option was chosen.