A dropdown list is useful if you need to ask a question that has many alternatives, like a selection of the countries in the world.
If you have a predefined dropdown that you want to use, select the desired dropdown from the bank. the page will be updating with value from the dropdown bank.
- Multiple selections on: Allows for selecting more than one item in the list.
- Sort alphabetically: Sorts all the items in the list alphabetically when storing in the database. NOTE: Sorting alphabetically does not work well with numbers. To get numbers listed correctly, enter then in the correct sequence and let this option be turned off.
- Dropdown size: Number of displayed items. If the size is larger than one, it is actually not a "dropdown" list anymore, but a vertically scrollable selection-list (as in the example above).
- Dropdown label: The displayed label of the dropdown list when no items are selected. This will be part of the list, but no value will be represented by this item, so the respondents can not select it. NOTE: It does not make sense to use a label if the size of the list is larger than one. This means that the first item will be this label, and it will look like it is part of the list.
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Items: Type each item in the dropdown list on one single line. Items must be entered one by one, and only one per line.
A dropdown list lets you distinguish between what is displayed in the list, and the values actually saved in the database. This may be necessary, if you are integrating the data with an external system, for example.
Let's say you make a list of countries, and you want to display the countries as they are normally written. e.g. Germany, France, Italy etc. But you want to save the codes, like DE, FR, IT. This is done by typing one item per line as before, but include both the value to be displayed, and what is stored, separated by "#@". To enter the countries above, type: Germany#@DE, France#@FR, Italy#@IT.
- Validation: selections required: Enforces the respondent to select at least this many items.
- Validation: selections allowed: Disallows the user to select more than this number of items from the list.
- Data variables: Headers for this question response to be used in raw data and SPSS reports. There is one data variable per item when multiple selection is on and one data variable per question for single selection question.
