Limited text substitution in answer options

Proposal

Increasingly, my colleagues and I use variables to capture recall periods that vary from round of the the survey to the next. For example, last school year, last agricultural season, etc. For this round, it may be 2023/24. For the next, it may be 2026/7

For some of those same surveys, recall periods appear in answer options. For such cases, we need to change those recall periods manually. These changes are often done at least twice for the same round of the survey: once for piloting that preceeds data collection; another time for data collection; and still another time for a second round of data collection that’s part of the same wave of data collection.

For this latter category of changes, it would be good to allow text substitution of variables that contain string constants. In this way, designers can update recall period parameters. Meanwhile, the answer option text would be reliably the same for all interviews.

See a French-language example below where Ramadan 2025, Eid al-Adha 2025, Christmast 2024, Easter 2025, and New Years 2025 appear. This module is asking about exceptional expenditures related to festivities.

Affected subsystems

Designer

Surveys

This would be useful for living standards surveys fielded in Western and Central Africa and likely several other surveys that either adopt this questionnaire or that likewise have a module to capture exceptional expenditures on festivities related to religion or life-cycle events.

Alternatives

There’s a clear alternative:

  • Keep track of where these updates need to be made
  • Make these changes manually to the answer options

Limits

For the data documentation that Survey Solutions creates to make sense, it seems reasonable to allow text substitution for string variables whose values is a constant that is not a function of anything else.