Composing Terminate Questions
This question type is used to indicate that a respondent should stop at this point in the survey, or that the respondent should redirect to a web site or another survey, either produced by Lighthouse Studio or another software system. It is a violation of the Lighthouse Studio license agreement to link multiple Lighthouse surveys such that the total resulting survey exceeds the data fields supported by your license.
Terminating Question
When a respondent reaches a Terminate question marked as "terminate," the survey is over. Reaching a terminating question prohibits respondents from backing up to change answers to previous questions. A common use of the terminating question is to terminate a respondent who is not eligible to complete the survey, given their answers to previous questions. You can have more than one terminating question in your survey (for example, one for disqualified respondents and another for qualified respondents), where each is formatted on a separate page. A terminating question cannot have any other questions on the same survey page.
To make a Terminate question a terminating question, click the Settings tab and check the Terminate Respondent check box. You can specify whether respondents reaching this question are Qualified/Complete (5) or Disqualified (4). You can additionally assign a disposition code for each terminating question (a value from 0 to 999) that is saved in the respondent's data set. This is useful for tabulating how respondents terminated the questionnaire if there are multiple termination points.
When terminating respondents, you can redirect them to a web site or another survey (rather than simply show the text for the question on the screen). In that case you can also set the Redirect Behavior. This functionality is described further below.
Redirect Behavior
Lighthouse Studio can link to other surveys or another web page by using the Terminate question type and selecting the Redirect Behavior. There are four redirect options:
1.Do not redirect. The respondent is shown the question text and the survey ends. If the question is marked as terminating they cannot go back and change responses.
2.Redirect immediately. Instead of showing the respondent the question text, they are immediately redirected to the specified web address.
3.After button click. The respondent is shown the question text, and must press a button to continue. If the question is marked as terminating they cannot go back and change responses. Once the button is clicked they are redirected to the specified web address.
4.After delay. The respondent is shown the question text, but after the specified delay they are redirected to the specified web address. When using this option, you should include a note that they will be redirected after a delay as the question will not display a countdown.
When using options 2, 3 or 4, Lighthouse Studio will redirect to the Web Address (URL) specified on the Settings tab. That URL can be a web site, or a link to start up another survey.
Typically, you will want to terminate respondents and mark them with Qualified/Complete (5) status when linking to another survey or website. To do so, check the Terminate Respondent box and use the drop down control to specify the Termination Status. Once a respondent is marked as Qualified/Complete, they cannot restart the current survey. If you are linking to an outside survey or program and plan to have respondents re-enter the current survey to complete it, you should not check the Terminate Respondent box.
When you link to other Lighthouse surveys, the URL you use in the Settings tab specifies the ciwweb.pl file (a Perl script) for the next survey to start up. That survey will most likely be located in a separate folder on your server, or perhaps on a new server altogether (see below).
You might want the link to simply restart the survey. This can be especially helpful if you are using Offline Surveys. Here is an example of a link that you might use to restart a survey:
ciwweb.pl?studyname=mysurvey
In the link above "mysurvey" is the name of the survey. Also, notice that the example above does not have "http://" in it. It is necessary to remove "http://" if using Offline Surveys.
The typical approach is to automatically pass through the user name, password, or other information from the first survey. We'll describe how to do this next.
URL link with Passwords
If you want to link to a new Lighthouse survey and automatically "pass through" the user name and/or password, you should link respondents directly to the Perl script located in the cgi-bin directory. This lets qualified respondents start the survey without having to type in their respondent identifier or see the login question (if included). Let's imagine that we wanted to link to a new Lighthouse survey called "abc" installed on the sawtoothsoftware.com server, located in the "studyabc" study root directory, with an identifier named pid of "michael". In the Web Address (URL) field on the Settings tab, we would specify:
http://www.sawtoothsoftware.com/studyabc/cgi-bin/ciwweb.pl?studyname=abc&pid=michael
When linking from a Lighthouse survey to another Lighthouse survey, to dynamically insert the respondent's identifier (named, as an example, pid), use [%pid%]. For example:
http://www.sawtoothsoftware.com/studyabc/cgi-bin/ciwweb.pl?studyname=abc&pid=[%pid%]
You can also pass additional variables into the data set, as long as those are defined as link variables:
http://www.sawtoothsoftware.com/studyabc/cgi-bin/ciwweb.pl?studyname=abc&pid=[%pid%]&zip=[%zipcode%]
In this example abc is the study name, an identifier called pid is used and the zip code for each respondent is already known and passed into the database. You can pass in as many additional variables as you want, as long as they are initially defined as link variables in the questionnaire access area and the length of the URL doesn't exceed that supported by browsers.
When respondents are linked to the new survey, if the identifiers are valid (and the quota is not complete) the respondent is sent to the first page following any login page (if specified). If the respondent is restarting an interview, the page where he/she left off is displayed.
Dealing with Special Characters in URLs
Data that include special characters should use the Sawtooth Script function EncodeForUrl(). This function will encode non-alphanumeric characters in the ASCII table between 32 and 126.
For example, email addresses contain the @ symbol. If you need to pass an email address as the username, it should be passed in the following manner:
http://www.sawtoothsoftware.com/studyabc/cgi-bin/ciwweb.pl?studyname=abc&pid=[%EncodeForUrl(emailaddress)%]
To be safe, you should always use the EncodeForUrl() function when using Sawtooth Script to include a variable within your URL.
