When creating a section presention block you have the following options.

Experiments conducted with a counterbalanced measures design “are one of the best ways to avoid the pitfalls of standard repeated measures designs, where the subjects are exposed to all of the treatments.”

3 condition counterbalanced experiment

Read more about counterbalancing at the excellent website http://www.experiment-resources.com/counterbalanced-measures-design.html

There is also no limit to the number of sections or questions in iSurvey.

Option 1 : Create survey conditions

You can use Section Presentation Blocks to easily create different survey conditions. The example below will show ONE section from the block at random.

The section shown is completely random, and not incremented.
i.e. participants 1, 4 and 7 seeing Section A
participants 2, 5 and 8 seeing Section B
participants 3, 6 and 9 seeing section C

Option 2 : Randomise sections

This type of Section Presentation Block allows you to randomise sections within the block as shown below.

Other things to note:
– You can have as many sections within a Section Presentation Block as you wish.
– There is no limit to the number of Section Presentation Blocks in any survey
– You only see the option to create presentation blocks if you are viewing iSurvey in ‘Advanced’ mode (set from the Preferences page.
– Deleting a Section Presentation Block does not delete  sections within that block.

Sections are used to easily paginate questions, but also have more advanced options such as creating section conditions or section presentation blocks.

A section needs to be created before you can add any questions to your survey.

Section Settings
Each section has the following settings:
1. Questions per page
2. Randomise all questions
3. Show  / do  not show question numbers
4. Section Information (optional)

1. Questions per page

By default ALL questions within a section are shown on the same page. This way a section can act as a ‘page’. e.g. A demographics page. However, you also have the option to display ‘x’ questions per page. This setting can be overridden for each individual section, giving you  maximum flexibility in how to present your questions.

2. Randomise all questions

You can choose to randomise the questions within each individual section, although this will NOT apply to randomising questions WITHIN a matrix block. Each matrix block has its own setting to allow for question randomisation.

3. Question Numbering

In some cases it may not be appropriate to auto-display numbers for each question. You can turn off auto-question numbering using this setting.

4. Section Information (Optional)

Finally, each section can have a description associated with it. This information (formatted free text) will be displayed at the top page at the start of this section. For sections using anything other than ‘Show all questions on one page’ this information is only shown on the FIRST page of the section.

a) Randomise sections within a survey
b) Create different survey conditions

To create either option you will first need to make sure that your viewing mode is set to ‘Advanced’ in the User Preferences.

Underneath each section (apart from the very last one) a new link appears as shown:

After clicking this link you then pick the following:

1. The last section that will appear in this block
2. How the block will be displayed i.e. randomly present ALL sections in the block, or only display ONE section at random.

The example below shows a presentation block where ONE section is shown at random to each participant. This could be used for creating simple survey conditions.

Final things to note:

1. Section presentation blocks MUST contain at least two sections
2. You can remove presentation blocks at any time and sections/questions in the block will not be deleted.
3. You can move sections into and out of presentation blocks by using the usual drop down ordering method, but you CANNOT change the order of the first or last section in the block.
4. Section Presentation Blocks are NOT duplicated once a survey has been duplicated. You will need to re-create any after you have a duplicated any survey.