Conjoint Surveys in surveydown

Due: Sep 30 by 11:59pm

Weight: This assignment is worth 3% of your final grade.

Purpose: The purpose of this assignment is to get familiar with how to implement a full conjoint survey in surveydown.

Assessment: This assignment is graded using a check system:

  • ✔+ (110%): Responses shows phenomenal thought and engagement with the course content. I will not assign these often.
  • ✔ (100%): Responses are thoughtful, well-written, and show engagement with the course content. This is the expected level of performance.
  • ✔− (50%): Responses are hastily composed, too short, and/or only cursorily engages with the course content. This grade signals that you need to improve next time. I will hopefully not assign these often.

Notice that this is essentially a pass/fail system. I’m not grading your writing ability and I’m not counting the number of words you write - I’m looking for thoughtful engagement. One or two sentences is not enough. Write at least a paragraph and show me that you did the readings assigned.

1. Get Organized

Follow these instructions:

  1. Download and edit this template.
  2. Unzip the template folder. Make sure you actually unzip it! (in Windows, right-click it and use “extract all”)
  3. Open the .Rproj file to open RStudio.
  4. Inside RStudio, open the hw4.qmd file, take notes, and write some example code as you go through the readings / exercises below.

2. Readings

Your next major team assignment is your survey plan. The central questions of your eventual survey will be your conjoint questions, which are the sets of randomized choice questions where respondents will be asked to make choices from different sets of alternatives. We have not yet gotten into all the details of how to set up those randomized questions (that will come soon!). But it is helpful at this stage to see an overview of the overall survey structure and how a conjoint survey can be built in surveydown.

With that in mind, read through this blog post I wrote on how to implement a choice-based conjoint survey in surveydown. It may not yet be immediately clear what every single piece of code is doing, but reading it at least once will help as we go forward with the class. You will probably want to use this blog post as a guide to implement your own conjoint surveys later in the class.

3. Reflect

Reflect on what you’ve learned while going through these readings and exercises. Is there anything that jumped out at you? Anything you found particularly interesting or confusing? Write at least a paragraph in your hw4.qmd file, and include at least one question. The teaching team will review the questions we get and will try to answer them either in Slack or in class.

If you’re unsure where to start with a reflection, try filling out this template:

“I used to think ______, now I think ______ 🤔”

4. Submit

To submit your assignment, follow these instructions:

  1. Render your .qmd file by either clicking the “Render” button in RStudio or running the command quarto::quarto_render("hw4.qmd") command.
  2. Open the rendered html file and make sure it looks good! Is all the formatting as you expected?
  3. Create a zip file of all the files in your R project folder for this assignment and submit it on the corresponding assignment submission on Blackboard.