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Value formats

Specify value labels and sort order

Updated at 2019-10-11 15:08:13 UTC
Diagram showing the relationship between raw data values (shown as gray shapes on the left) and their formatted display values (shown as blue horizontal bars of varying lengths on the right), illustrating how survey data is stored internally versus how it is presented to users

Survey engines usually represent data internally in a cryptic format for computers, and have additional "meta data" that describes how to present the data for people.

For instance, a survey may have a question q1 which is presented to English-speaking respondents as "Generally, how would you say things are in your life?". 

Similarly the response values are represented in data as integers (e.g. 1, 2, ...) but displayed to the user as "Very happy", "Pretty happy", etc.

Survey results showing two questions from a Gender and Generations Survey: Q1 about happiness levels (Very happy 30.5%, Pretty happy 50.9%, Not too happy 15.4%, Don't know/Refused 3.2%) and Q2 about health rating (Excellent 25.4%, Good 51.7%, Only fair 17.8%, Poor 4.9%, Don't know/Refused 0.3%), with horizontal bar charts displaying the response distributions

Format toolbar button

You can toggle the format button in the toolbar to see the underlying values in every question.

Protobi interface showing the Format button highlighted in yellow in the toolbar, with the same survey questions displayed below showing numeric values (1, 2, 3, 9) instead of text labels, demonstrating the toggle between formatted text and raw data values

Format dialog

To see and refine the mapping for specific questions, press the element icon (blue circle) and choose "Format...". This will bring up the following dialog:

Edit format dialog box showing a table with columns for Value, Format, Mean, Sort as, Sort last, Hide, and Remove, displaying the mapping between numeric values (1, 2, 3, 9) and their text labels (Very happy, Pretty happy, Not too happy, Don't know/Refused), with a checkbox option to 'Group unformatted values into [other]' and a 'Clear all formats' link at the bottom
  • Value corresponds to the raw  value in the data file
  • Format is the string for display
  • Mean is an alternative value to be used for calculating summary statistics
    • See practical use cases in this tutorial
  • Sort as is an alternative value to be used for sorting
  • Sort last indicates the value should be sorted at the end, regardless
  • Hide indicates the value should not be shown in the distribution
  • Remove deletes the row from this dialog