Randomize-Within Groups (Questionnaire Files)

QuickInfo

MediaLab will randomly order and present all items sharing the same RWG value.

Value

Any positive integer value

Purpose

You may wish to randomly order and present certain items in your Questionnaire File. To do this, assign the same RWG value to all the items you want to have randomized with each other. For example, if you have five items you want randomized, assign them each a 1 in the RWG field of each item. The five items will be randomly presented in the five positions they occupy in the Questionnaire File. All other files will be presented in their assigned positions as long as their RWG value is either 0 or none. You can independently randomize another group of items by assigning them all a 2, another group with 3s and so forth.

Example

In your Questionnaire File, you want to present 1) an instruction screen, 2) five scale response items randomly ordered, 3) three fill-in-the-blank items randomly ordered, and 4) a final Word document. Assign an RWG value of 0 or none to the instruction screen and Word document to keep them where they are, a 1 to the five scale response items, and 2 to the three fill-in-the-blank items. That's it. To randomize the order that groups of items are presented (e.g., whether the scale items or the fill-in-the-blank items are presented first),see Randomize Between Groups .

Note

For ease of analysis, variables will be written to the data file in the order the occur in the Questionnaire File, not in the randomized order in which they are presented while running MediaLab.