If you have a multiple choice question that includes “other” (or something similar) as an answer option and, if that answer is selected, you need your surveyor or respondent to type in an answer, the most seamless way to achieve this is using the specify-other field plug-in (learn about field plug-ins).

This can also be achieved without a field plug-in, but this requires adding a text field which cannot appear on the same screen in a field-list as the select_one or select_multiple field with the “other” response option.

Follow this example approach:

1. Add a select_one or select_multiple named ${multchoicefield} and, in your choice list, the internal value for the option “other” is 99.

2. After your select_one or select_multiple, create a text field. (Remember: this text field needs to appear on a separate screen from the multiple choice field, so you should not put the multiple choice field and text field on the same screen).

3. In the label column for this text field, you can put the following (or similar) question text: “Please specify other:”.

4. In the relevance column for this text field, put the following expression (make sure to modify this expression to use the actual name of your multiple choice field):

selected(${multchoicefield}, 99)

And that’s it! Now, during the survey, if your surveyor selects the “other” answer option, and then swipes forward to the next screen, they will see a text field prompting them to specify other.

Why you shouldn’t use or_other with SurveyCTO

The or_other option is an Open Data Kit feature for automatically including an option to specify an unlisted open/text answer in response to a select_one or select_multiple field (e.g. “select_one choicelist or_other”). Though SurveyCTO supports this feature we do not document it or encourage its usage because it has the following limitations:

1. You cannot dynamically filter your choice lists when you use or_other.
2. The label of the ‘specify other’ text field generated by or_ther is automated and cannot be directly translated into a custom language if your form is in multiple languages.
3. You also cannot use the ability to pre-load choices from an external file with or_other.When you select the “other” option added by or_other in a select_one field, the value “other” is stored in the select_one field (even though it isn’t in your choice list).
4. However, if you have numeric values for all your other choices, your select_one data will be a mix of numbers and strings. This means when you import your data into another analysis tool like Stata or SPSS, that entire column will be classified as a string rather than a categorical variable. This will make the analysis more complex as it will require converting the strings to numbers before analysis can be done. The table below illustrates how the data is exported. You will clearly see the string ‘other’ that is automatically generated.
   

   single_choice	single_choice_other
   1
   other	This is the other value specified
   3

   As such, you will have to do string cleaning on it first.

5. If you use Stata and are using our auto-generated .do file to label your data, this will cause the .do file to give an error in cases. This is because Stata will try to label the numeric values of select_one fields in spite but Stata cannot label a variable that is a mix of numbers and strings (it is classified as a string). This is especially critical as issues relating to this tend to only show up during analysis.

Getting in touch with support

If you are still unclear about how to create a specify other field after a multiple choice question or you followed the steps above and are still unable to get your form to behave the way you want it to, don’t worry. If you are a user on a paid SurveyCTO server with access to support, you can submit a support request from the My requests link in the top right of this page. Someone from our team will help you investigate further. Please just make sure to attach an Excel copy of your form.

If you’re a community user and hence don’t have professional support, you can post the issue, along with your Excel form, to the community forum for assistance from other community members.

Also see this article which helps diagnose a related common issue: Why doesn’t the “Specify other” text field appear when more than one answer option is selected?

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Functions and operators referenced in this article: selected(). For a full list of SurveyCTO functions and operators, please read this help topic.

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