Using labels that are easy to interpret

It makes it much easier to interpret test results if an interaction has been set up properly, and there are two things which will help test administrators interpret the results of a Choice interaction later on. The first is to label the choices which test-takers have. If you don’t give the choices explicit labels, they are referred to as choice_1, choice_2, etc, which means that the test administrator won’t be able to see straight away in the results table what (in our example, which countries) the test-taker has chosen.

The following screenshot is taken in the preview mode; the data in the line Submitted data are identical to those in the final result set.

Default result set

To get round this, you can label the choices when you’re setting up the interaction. In the example below, the third choice of country is Austria. While you are defining the choices in your interaction, the panel on the right shows the Choice Properties. It contains a box labeled Identifier, and here you can give the choice a label. Often the simplest thing to do is repeat the words used in the label of the choice itself – i.e. to give the choice called Austria the identifier "austria", so that anyone trying to read the results later can see straight away what the test-taker’s response was.

Bear in mind that all identifiers must be in the Latin alphabet, and cannot contain accents, hyphens or underscores!

Choice identifiers

Remember we said there were two things which make results easier to interpret. It’s also a good idea to label the topic of the interaction so it can be quickly identified. Whilst you’re in Response mode, the panel on the right shows the Response Properties, which contains a box labeled Response Identifier. Here you can give the interaction topic a name – in this example, lux_neighbours would serve us well.

Response identifier

To try it out, check the preview, answer the question and click on Submit. As you can see, the result set is now much easier to interpret:

Result set with custom identifiers