Randomizing respondents?

[Alexandra]

Hi. I'd like to be able to expose my respondents to an experimental manipulation by randomizing them into groups -- a pretty common social science tool. Is this feasible in Checkbox? Just to give a simple example, I'd like to be able to do something like this:

"Please think of the following color: [red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple]"

... where the respondent only sees 1 of the 6 works in [] ...

"Now, please tell me what mood you are in _________________."

Is there a way to do that?

Thanks in advance for any pointers.

[pwiesner]

Unfortunately Checkbox does not contain the functionality you have described. We have received this feature request before. I will update the developer tracker item which covers this request to indicate that you expressed in interest in it.

[Alexandra]

OK, thanks (but darn).

I think I could set this up if I could do the following:

Pipe in the start time.
Identify just the seconds value for the start time (i.e. 00 -- 59); this would be close enough to a real randomizer for my purposes.
Use the seconds value as a condition with less than/greater than functions.

Is that possible?

[pwiesner]

There is no way to pipe just the seconds. It might be possible to obtain this information with some costume javascript, but that is not something we can support.

How will respondents be sent to the survey? If the respondents have Checkbox user accounts you could pre-populate a custom user attribute with a random number and than use this value to control conditional logic.

If the users are anonymous, it might be possible to pass in the value and capture it with a hidden item. This would only work if you were distributing individual links to respondents or if they navigated to the survey from a portal site.