Smart Loops
Smart Loops allow you to quickly replicate groups of questions. Whether you are working on a monadic or sequential monadic survey design, or you have elements in your survey that need to be repeated, Smart Loops will greatly reduce your programming time and effort! Smart Loops comes with it's own interface in the Survey Editor that can be activated in a few ways.
Adding Smart Loops: From the Question Type Menu
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Adding Smart Loops: From the Logic Guide
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Read more about the aytm Logic Guide here
Building a Smart Loop
The columns in the Smart Loop represent variables you can add to your survey. When you add a new Smart Loop to your survey, the default has [variable_1], and [variable_2] populated.
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Assigning Runs
Think of runs as monadic legs of your survey, if you have 4 concepts to test, you would have 4 runs in a Smart Loop. Runs are expressed by each row in the table. Each run (row) should contain a single concept, for example, Concept A image, Concept A brand name, and Concept A logo, should be all in the same run (row).
This is the equation to calculate how many respondents will go through each run. [total N] * [# of runs/respondents] / [# runs]
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Note: this is assuming there is no logic (e.g.: show/hide if) within the nodes. Conditional logic that restricts who can see questions or sets of questions could impact distribution.
Advanced Settings
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Syntax for Balancing
When balancing by traits, trait characteristics must be in quotation marks (single or double). Example - balancing by gender Programming syntax: [Group Q2-4 and Q5-7 and Q8-10 balance gender = “f”, gender = “m” max 1] Example - balancing by answer selections (Q5a8, Q5a9, Q4a2) among these groups [Group Q6-9 and Q10-13 and Q14-17]. Programming syntax: [Group Q6-9 and Q10-13 and Q14-17 balance Q5a8, Q5a9, Q4a2] When adding balancing parameters to Group logic (including within Smart Loops), you are specifying that the distribution of respondents matching that criteria are balanced evenly across nodes (e.g., ~33% of females will be assigned to each of Q2-4, Q5-7, and Q8-10). Any between respondent segment balancing needs to be specified at the survey level through the Target Market page for traits or custom quotas for question responses.
The exception to this would be the syntax for balancing age, since it holds numeric values. See an example of age balance syntax here. |
Please note all of these settings are based on the total number of respondents requested, runs per respondent and the number of runs. If you have an conditional logic (e.g.: show/hide if) within the question sets or nodes this will impact the distribution.
Programming your Question Set
Note: If you do not include references to your variables in the Smart Loop questions, you will not be able to launch your survey. |
Converting to regular questions
To view the logic used to program the Smart Loop, or to customize the question sets, click the settings wheel to open the Advanced settings, and then click Convert into regular questions; questions will appear in the master question set with all runs listed sequentially. If you're simply checking the logic, click the Undo button to convert the questions back into a Smart Loop. |
Additional Smart Loop Logic
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Nested Group Logic within Smart Loops
If you'd like to further manipulate the order of your concepts within the Smart Loop, you can utilize Nested Group Logic to randomize sub-groups, and/or indicate a leading question to be followed by other randomized groups. Learn more about Nested group logic. |