Dear all,

I'm afraid I have to bother you with yet another beginner's question, but I couldn't find a solution in the Inquisit help.

Question: How can I make sure that participants give an answer to an openended question:
Is there a command so that they can only continue to the next page when they have entered something (or a minimum number of characters) in response to an openended question?

Or, alternatively, can I use a minimum presentation time for the question, such that clicking on the "Next" button is only possible after, say, 20s ?

Thanks in advance!

A setup along these lines should do the trick:

<openended myopenended>
[...]
/ validresponse = (anyresponse)
/ required = true
</openended>

~Dave

Thanks, this is what I was looking for!

Just for the future, is there also a possibility to display the question for at least xxx seconds ?

No straightforward way to do this, I believe. The '/ responsetime' attribute might be useful here though:

<openended myopenended>
[...]
/ validresponse = (anyresponse)
/ responsetime = 2000
</openended>

Set up like this, Inquisit would only accept answers given after 2000 ms into the trial.

Hope this helps,

~Dave

Thank you for the support, Dave!

The validresponse attribute cannot define a minimum number of characters, can it?

For that you'll have to look into using expressions via the '/ isvalidresponse' attribute or -- more general -- the '/ ontrialbegin', '/ ontrialend', etc. event attributes. For example, you could use the 'length()' function (see string functions section in the functions documentation) to check if the typed response has a minimum length...

Or you could use Regular Expressions (RegEx) via the '/ mask' attribute. See this thread for some hints: http://www.millisecond.com/forums/Topic4270.aspx.

~Dave