Max Weylandt.

Qualtrics’ text file format for importing surveys has some undocumented features

7 July, 2023

I’m working on a survey experiment where I systematically vary the design of the survey, which ended up being a lot to do manually. So I’m generating the questions in R and importing them into qualtrics via the platform’s Advanced Format text files.

These files are fairly straightforward:

[[AdvancedFormat]]

[[Block:MC Block]]

[[Question:MC:Dropdown]]
drop down
[[Choices]]
choice a
choice b
choice c

This creates a block named MC Block and a multiple choice question with answers presented in a drop-down.

The qualtrics support page lists the tags you can specify, including tags for a wide variety of questions, page breaks, question IDs, and more.

Sadly, it doesn’t list all of the question types available in the online question editor. I realized this when I wanted to add a timing question on each page generated by my document, to see how long people are spending on that particular question. I decided to just try it and lo and behold:

[[AdvancedFormat]]
[[Question:Timing]]
[[ID:timing_l_1]]

works! It yields this:

I haven’t found this documented in my search, so thought I would put it online.

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