[solved] Complex skips not working across multiple questionnaires

[jarvis24]

Hi Natalie, I think I finally figured out what's going on. Until tonight, I was quite certain that any skipto values would always "pass through" any subsequent questionnaires until the target variable was found or the experiment ended. But it appears that they terminate at the start of the next questionnaire. I was so surprised by this that I checked back to some much earlier v2004 code and this was the case even back then. I will have to check out some other posts where I know this has come up as an issue. Regardless, it seems to explain your current problem.

The consequent problem in this case is that the responses.xls file assigns the skipto value for FASM2.que at the end of the FASM.que. This skipto value, consequently, was not being applied because skipto's are apparently reset to nothing at the start of the next que file.

SO..

I think I may have found a work-around for now--I tested it here and it seems to work. Please see the attached revision (where just FASM and FASM2 are administered). The trick--I removed your skipto item from the end of the FASM que file and entered it as the first item in the subsequent FASM2 file. That's pretty much it.

You'll now see that if they answer "no" to all questions in the FASM file, the responses.xls file assigns a skipto value of "skipfasm2" to the first item in FASM2. The item "skipfasm2" is a blank instruction item at the end of the FASM2 file.

You may also notice I placed (d1) parameters on the two bogus instruction items--this sets a 1 second automatic continuation time on them so subjects do not have to actually click continue to pass the blank items.

--

As far as dealing with this issue in the future, I'm not sure yet. Even though skipping through que files should be default bahaviour, I don't want to break existing experiments where this "within que" skipto limit is actually expected by previous users of the software.

I'm thinking what I could do is allow users to add an optional character such as "!" at the end of any skipto value--and that this will tell MediaLab to maintain that skipto value beyond the confines of the current questionnaire. I think that would be a fairly easy way to handle it without affecting the backward compatibility of MediaLab with existing experiments. Any thoughts welcome.

Hope this helps.
Blair