Step-by-Step
Validation is great to use if you want to ensure that respondents cannot skip a question in your survey. Without validation, a respondent can pick and choose which questions to answer and submit a half finished survey.
It is also helpful when you want to ensure the data you collect is legitimate. An example of this is when you are collecting email addresses and you want to make sure the answers typed in by respondents are in a proper email format.
You must manually enable validation on each question you would like to validate.
To Enable Validation:
- Click the question that you want to validate.
- In the question options pane to the right, under Validation Options, select Force Response or Request Response.
- Select Validation Type if necessary.
A red box appears next to your question indicating that you have enabled validation.
More Information
If force response is enabled, respondents will be forced to answer the question before they can progress to the next page of the survey. If a respondent does not answer and tries to advance, a notification will appear that indicates the question must be answered.
Request Response
If request response is enabled and a respondent does not answer the question, an alert will inform the respondent the question was not answered. The respondent will have the option to return or continue the survey. This is also called soft validation.
Validation types vary from question to question and can be viewed in the question options pane when a question is selected.
Custom Validation
Available with all question types. Custom validation allows you to further customize the conditions that must be met for the validation to pass and allows you to set a custom error message to appear when the respondent does not meet the conditions.
To set up Custom Validation
- Select Custom Validation on the question pane.
- Click the Custom Validation link.
- Select a condition for validation. You can base the condition on any question in the survey. Click the blue plus sign
on the right to add multiple conditions.
- Select an error message to display.
- Click Load a Saved Message.
- Click Global Library: Qualtrics Library to access the default system messages.
- If you select your own library, click New Message and add a description.
- Click the plus button
under error to create a new message.
- From the Require Response list, click the error message that you want to use or click New to write your own.
- Under Message, type the message you want to appear if the condition is not met.
- Click Save.
Content Validation
Available for Text Entry type questions and the Allow Text Entry option in multiple choice questions. This allows you to specify the kind of text input allowed. Set the validation to limit the response to a number or email address. You can also specify a min/max length and character range.
Answer Ranges
Available for Multiple Choice-Multiple Answer, Pick, Group, and Rank, Hot Spot, and Matrix Table-Multiple Answer. This allows you to specify how many answer choices you want the respondent to select. The system will not let the respondent go on if their responses do not fall in the correct range.
- If you set a Force Response validation on a Matrix table, each row in the matrix will need to be answered for the validation to pass. It is recommended that if you have an “other” option in the matrix, that you do not use Force Response.
- To force a response on multiple questions, first select those questions and then a Force Response option will appear on the right. More information about selecting multiple questions can be found here.
- Double check your validation before distributing your survey. You don’t want to stop respondents from finishing the survey because of a validation error. Respondents will not be able to progress in the survey if the validation you have set up is not met.