Exploration in Conditional Survey Questions

The survey question & answer structure is embedded in a JSON data structure.

The data structure consists of main two objects: a Question and an Answer.

Question

A Question has 3 properties:

• name : (string) the ID to be used when recording the response. Example: "building-condition"
• text: (string) the text to render for this question. Example: "What is the building condition?"
• answers: an array of Answer objects

Answer

An Answer has 2 required properties and 1 optional property:

• name: (string) the value to use when recording the response. Example: "2"
• text: (string) the text to render for this answer. Example: "Fair"
• questions: (optional) an array of Question objects. These will only be used/displayed if the parent answer has been selected. If that answer is deselected, these questions should be hidden and their data should not be recorded.

Root object

The root object has one property, questions, which is a list of Question objects. These questions are always used; they are not conditioned on any other particular answers.

Example

{
  "questions": [
      { "name" : "use",
        "text" : "What's the use?",
        "answers" : [
            { "value" : "retail",
              "text" : "Retail",
              "questions" : [
                { "name" : "retail-type",
                  "text" : "What type of retail?",
                  "answers" : [
                    { "value" : "best",
                      "text" : "the best type of retail",
                      "questions" : [
                        { "value" : "good-level",
                          "text" : "How good?",
                          "answers" : [
                            { "value" : "3",
                              "text" : "excellent"
                            },
                            { "value" : "2",
                              "text" : "quite good"
                            },
                            { "value" : "1",
                              "text" : "pretty good"
                            }
                          ]
                        }
                      ]
                    },
                    { "value" : "worst",
                      "text" : "the worst type of retail"
                    }
                  ]
                },
                { "name" : "vod",
                  "text" : "Vacant+Open+Dangerous?",
                  "answers" : [
                    { "value" : "1",
                      "text" : "yes"
                    },
                    {
                      "value" : "0",
                      "text" : "no"
                    }
                  ]
                }
              ]
            },
            { "value" : "service",
              "text" : "Service",
              "questions" : [
                { "name" : "service-type",
                  "text" : "What type of service?",
                  "answers" : [
                    { "value" : "dry-cleaner",
                      "text" : "A Dry Cleaner, yo!"
                    },
                    { "value" : "other",
                      "text" : "Other Service"
                    }
                  ]
                }
              ]
            },
            { "value" : "storage",
              "text" : "Storage"
            }
        ]
      }
  ]
}