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Two kinds of setting

  • Attempt caps decide how persistent the interviewer is — how many times it re-asks, reads back, clarifies or nudges before it records a question as skipped and moves on.
  • Step levels decide the pace of the conversation — how quickly a pause ends the respondent’s turn, how long a silence is tolerated, and how much the interviewer reasons about each reply.
Both are set once for the whole survey and can be overridden on individual questions.

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Where they’re set

See Agent section, FAQs and Behaviours for those sections’ other settings.

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Attempt caps

Each cap is a whole number from 0 to 50. Spell only appears in the Behaviour panel of a First name question; there’s no survey-wide Spell cap.

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Choosing caps

The defaults are generous. Many surveys run better with lower numbers — two asks, two confirms and two clarifies keeps the interview moving when a respondent is struggling with a question, rather than asking five times.
  • Don’t know and Decline at 1 give one gentle nudge, which recovers a surprising number of answers without pressuring anyone. Set them to 0 on sensitive questions — income, health, voting — so a “don’t know” or “I’d rather not say” is accepted straight away.
  • Required questions always nudge a refusal at least once. If a question is required and its Decline is 0, the question inspector warns “Required questions nudge a refusal at least once, but decline nudges is 0 in Behaviour. Raise it to 1 or turn Required off.” and Readiness warns that the question “is required but accepts the first refusal (attempts.decline is 0).” The interview behaves as if Decline were 1.
  • All caps at 0 makes a question say its prompt once: a clearly heard answer is still recorded, but nothing is re-asked, read back or nudged — useful for a notice authored as a question (with Statement prompt on).

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Overriding on a question

In the question’s Behaviour panel:
  • Inherit survey default on (the default) — the fields show the survey’s caps, greyed out: “The survey’s own Behaviours, from the Agent section. Nothing is stored on this question.” Change the survey’s caps later and this question follows.
  • Inherit survey default off — the fields become editable, and this question keeps its own numbers (“Nudges before a don’t-know or a refusal is recorded. 0 accepts the first one.”). Later changes to the survey’s caps no longer affect it.
A question that has its own caps stays pinned to them until you turn Inherit survey default back on.

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Step levels

Each can be set to low, medium or high.

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How levels are resolved

  • On a question, each level is Template default or low / medium / high. Left on Template default, the question follows the survey’s Step levels in the Agent section.
  • On the survey (Agent section), each level is Template default, Low, Medium or High. Left on Template default, the built-in levels apply: Eagerness high, Idle medium, Thinking low.
  • First name and Phone number questions wait longer through pauses by design, because names are spelled letter by letter and numbers are read in groups. Leave their Eagerness on Template default unless you have a reason to change it.

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The FAQ and behaviour sets

FAQ answers and the busy and stop closing lines have their own step levels, set in the FAQs and Behaviours sections. They don’t follow the survey’s step levels, so slowing the questionnaire down for your audience doesn’t slow down a one-line answer to “who is calling?”.
  • FAQ set — “The gates every FAQ answer above is spoken under — its own, not the survey’s. An answer is one line said over a question that is still open, so it waits briefly and hands straight back.”
  • Behaviour set — “The gates the busy and stop closes are spoken under — their own, not the survey’s. The reason is already recorded and the call is ending, so the line is delivered and the wait after it is short.”
In these two sets an unset level reads Survey default. When unset, Eagerness is high (“Unset here: high.”) and Idle is low (“Unset here: low.”); Thinking follows the survey’s.

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Next Steps