Opening demographics page

Open the study with one required demographics page combining a numeric age box, a gender choice and an education dropdown.

When to use it

Use this when your analysis needs basic sample descriptors and you want them collected inside the study, with wording and answer options you control, saved alongside the rest of the results. The naive version, a page of optional free text boxes, produces blanks, typos and unparseable ages that cost more to clean than to prevent; typed widgets plus mandatory answers give complete, analysable data from the first participant. If your recruitment platform or the project’s participant registration already supplies these details, skip the page and read the registered values where you need them instead.

Trial file

type	content	head	responseType	responseOptions	required	pageBreak	button1
instructions	Before the task begins please answer three quick questions about yourself.						NEXT
form		How old are you?	box	min:18;max:99	1
form		What is your gender?	radio	Woman;Man;Non-binary;Prefer not to say	1
form		What is the highest level of education you have completed?	dropdown	Secondary school;Vocational qualification;Undergraduate degree;Postgraduate degree	1	1
instructions	Thank you. Press NEXT to begin the main task.						NEXT

How it works

The three question rows are consecutive type=form rows, so they share one survey page; head carries each question’s text. Each form row writes its own row in the results file.

The age question is a box input whose responseOptions cell carries option and value pairs: min:18;max:99 sets per box numeric bounds, and the presence of those bounds also turns the box into a number input. The gender and education questions are choice widgets, so their responseOptions cells list the choices separated by semicolons; a choice question with that cell left empty would give the participant nothing to pick. Choices display in the written order because responseOptionsRandom is not used.

required set to exactly 1 makes each question mandatory, so the page cannot be submitted with anything unanswered. On form rows only the literal value 1 works: 0, yes or true silently leave the question optional.

pageBreak set to 1 on the dropdown row ends the page there. The page would end anyway because the next row is not a form, but the explicit 1 keeps the boundary stable if you later append more form rows, and a literal 1 is the only break token recognised as a page start when form rows inherit timer labels.

One silent trap: responseType values are matched case sensitively, so Radio or Dropdown renders display only text with nothing to answer, and no warning is shown.

Variations

• Hint at the expected format by adding placeholder:Age in years to the age row’s responseOptions; the pairs are applied as HTML input attributes.
• Let participants self describe by adding responseOther with 1 on the gender row; it appends an “other” choice with a text input, and only radio, checkboxes and dropdown honour it.
• Ask more questions on the same screen by inserting extra form rows before the row that carries the pageBreak.
• Make a question optional by leaving its required cell genuinely empty; on form rows every value other than the literal 1 also means optional.