Multiple Choice

One of the most commonly used types of survey questions asks the respondent to choose between various options. Whether it is age, income level, or any one of a myriad of topics, multiple choice is a necessary element of many surveys. The markup provided here allows for the creation of both alphabetic and numeric multiple choice. This is useful for cases where the response to a question can be one of several choices and for alternating between presentations.

General Form

Specification:

    <multiple choice>             --required function name    <text [text of the question] >    <option [alpha/numeric] [single/multiple] [horizontal/vertical]>    <list /choice1/choice2/choice3......>    </multiple choice> 

The following are the options for this markup:

<multiple choice> is the required keyword identifier for this question type.

<text [text] > of the question, in brackets, follows the keyword identifier.

The third set of commands specifies the multiple-choice options, which includes: <option .......> see below for details:

1. alpha has alphabetic choices, meaning that the user can select from one or more in a sequence of letter choices (a,b,c,d...).

2. numeric allows for choices using numbers, such as one or more in the sequence (1,2,3,4...).

3. single means that only one choice can be chosen from the list when answering the question.

4. multiple means that more than one can be chosen from the list, up to N choices when answering the question.

5. horizontal format means that the choices will be listed side by side on the screen or on paper.

6. vertical format means that the choices are listed on separate lines.

<list / / /...> specifies the choices for each of the selections in the list. The individual choices should be separated by forward slashes.

</multiple choice> closes the markup.

The syntax for the various choices needs to be specified in the order presented above. Selection choices listed in the "list" markup should be placed exactly as they are to appear in the final version. The second line of any markup is the question text.

Example/Alphabetic. An example of how this markup can be used is as follows:

    <multiple choice>    <text What is your favorite color?>    <option alpha single vertical>    <list /blue/red/green>    </multiple choice> 

which will produce output as follows:

What is your favorite color?

1. blue

2. red

3. green

Choice: []

Example/Other Formats. Numeric will bring about the selections with numeric entries: 1, 2, 3, etc. The multiple option will allow selection of the desired (N) number of choices. Vertical presents the choices in a vertical list format, while horizontal does it in a horizontal side-by-side format. These are generally similar in appearance and do not need to be illustrated.