With anchors I guess you mean answer options / items of the scale? Just use the normal Array question type (I assume you are working with array questions). With the normal array question type you can create your own scale (called "label set").dhawk312 wrote: 1) I use 1-5, 1-7, and 1-9 anchors in my item responses. How can I manually create 1-7 or 1-9 anchors? Only 1-5 or 1-10 are available via the UI.
There are quite a few explanations on how to create a random number via expression manager in an equation question. So you would create a random number between 1 and 2 in the case of 50/50 and the show / hide the respective questions via EM (or conditions). Actually quite easy if you know how to do it, at the beginning probably not that intuitive as in Qualtrics.2) For my experimental conditions, I cannot figure out how to randomly assign participants. In Qualtrics I achieve this by setting a Randomizor in the SurveyFlow where 50% (or whatever appropriate percentage) are randomly assigned to a condition and 50% to the other condition. I tried doing this in LimeSurvey but the amount of options was overwhelming and they made little sense to me (note, I am not a programmer, and the branching options seem to written in programmer lingo).
Well, here we go. Free vs. expensive license. A lot of the development is done by voluntaries and of course there are not as many resources available as in companies like Qualtrics, that have quite a big budget. For an open source app I find the documentation of LS very good, but it is for sure not ideal. However, the forum support here is pretty good in my opinion and there are many universities who's students use Limesurvey without any training. Will there be a learning curve: for sure. Especially if you are used to another software. If you start from scratch it is often easier to get into the new processes.3) The UI is quite clunky and not very user-friendly. I looked up tutorials but many were out of date. Qualtrics has QualtricsU tutorials on their website and lots of documentation written in researcher-oriented language. Does LimeSurvey has anything similar? My undergrad and grad students can easily jump into Qualtrics, but LimeSurvey looks like it's going to take some training time.
I don't know Qualtrics, but I have heard that it is pretty simple to use. So you might have some learning curve at the beginning. Limesurvey at the moment does not have the most intuitive UI, I agree with you. I think that even the previous UI (in 2.05/2.6) was better and I was one of the people who was asking for a more modern interface. Unfortunately the changes were not ideal. So you will need to decide if you can live with this UI of Limesurvey and are able to administrate the installation, make updates, etc. or if you rather go the SAAS aproach and continue with Qualtrics.4) Any comments, suggestions, advice from others who have transitioned from Qualtrics to LimeSurvey that can help with switching over? I've been using Qualtrics for a very long time, and I use a lot of advanced features around piped text, inserting pictures or videos for manipulations and recording times spent on the page, pulling embedded data from weblinks (e.g., sona systems id numbers), and so forth. I feel comfort with Qualtrics' design, although the new redesign they pushed out last summer is awful.