Curious about the slider, date, and related questions storing default values as answers even without user interaction

[kweav]

Description

Working on another survey and included thedate and slider question types. We've noticed in testing that (even if we mark these questions as required), if we don't interact with the questions, the default value is saved as the selected response (in the database or preview_data.csv). I see from the release notes that this choice was intentional and listed as a bug fix:

surveydown/NEWS.md

Line 54 in 1ec8cdf

- Bug fix: `slider`, `slider_numeric`, `date`, and `daterage` questions now will be marked as answered without user interaction if the Next/Close button is pushed, and will have their default value saved.

Wondering if you could provide some more context for why this is necessary? The server seems to know I haven't interacted with the question because the question is still highlighted blue. So would it be possible to store an NA (if not a required question) or prompt the user to interact (if a required question) rather than storing the default value? Our major concern is that we could have a response bias for these questions since we may be recording responses that aren't truly user input.

[kweav]

Also wanted to thank you again -- so impressed with this package, everything it's capable of, your documentation, and your speedy and helpful responses!!

[jhelvy]

@pingfan-hu and I have gone back and forth with what to do about the default values for these question types. My understanding is that these questions require some default value. It is possible that we could detect if the default value was not changed to replace it with NA in the stored data.

I believe the reason we chose not to do that was because what if the user intended the default value to be their response? In those cases, we would be replacing their actually desired value with NA. We could add the addition of detecting whether or not the user has interacted with the question at all, but if the question is not required, then they could simply keep the default value without interacting with the question and continue forward, and we again would be replacing their desired value with NA.

As far as I know, there is no way to know whether the default value is their desired value or not, which I believe is the same situation in other survey platforms. My best advice is to choose a default value that you expect to NOT be the desired value by anyone (to the extent possible), thereby forcing them to select something else.

[jhelvy]

I did a little searching with the help of Claude, and it seems that other survey software platforms handle this issue in different ways.

Alchemer will only store the default value if the user actually interacts with the question, storing NA otherwise: https://help.alchemer.com/help/unanswered-slider

With Qualtrics, the default slider value is the position on the left, and apparently that can't be changed: https://community.qualtrics.com/custom-code-12/no-default-on-graphic-sliders-sliders-in-general-860

We could implement the Alchemer approach if we wanted. We already keep track of whether or not the user has interacted with the question, so we could have a logic where the value stored is NA unless the user interacts with the question, after which it will store whatever value is selected, whether that's the default or something else.

[kweav]

I think the Alchemer approach would be my personal preference, but agree with your other responses in the thread that there are workarounds/other approaches that we can use (such as adding a No Response default). Thank you both, @jhelvy and @pingfan-hu!

[pingfan-hu]

Hi @kweav ! Thanks for your acknowledgment! And yes, like @jhelvy said, we did have some back and forth.
In surveydown, most survey questions have answers being empty until interacted by the respondent, but these types are different: slider, slider_numeric, date, and date_range. They come with a default value when they appear, which is also hard-coded into Shiny's widgets -- the interface that we used for our survey questions.
The best solution is to NOT have the slider and empty date input box, but unfortunately they are not allowed by the widget, so we had to look for a work-around.

Our solution is what you see: a default answer shown in the UI, which is saved in the database if the nav button is pushed.

I'll explain using some examples.

The current logic:

• Scenario 1: Say you have a slider question whose default answer is 5, and you want 5. Then it's normal that you skip over this question. But in the system, this question is not interacted, so it doesn't even have the value of 5 being stored in the database. However, as you push the nav button, the storing event is triggered, and the 5 appears in that cell.
• Scenario 2: For this same question, say that you didn't want 5 being your answer but you simply forgot about this. Unfortunately, this error cannot be captured by the system and an unintended response is stored, which is a disadvantage of this logic.

In our old logic, these 2 above scenarios happen inversely: only when you interact with this question can you have the answer stored. But imagine for scenario 1 you really want 5 and it shows 5: you have to scroll away from 5 and scroll back. This is an unintuitive movement. As a UI designer, I tend to avoid this.

Therefore, our current logic, although not perfect, should still work fine in most cases.

I hope that answers your question.

[jhelvy]

Just to add another thought here - at least for the slider type questions, one thing you could do is make one of the options something like "No response" and set that as the default. That way if they don't touch the question, the stored value will be "No response".