This is a very general structure to hold a question with multiple choice answers. There may be just one answer expected, or multiple answers. If the options have no definite ordering, then it is simply an option list.

There may be an externally-defined, reusable scheme for the answer items.

For this kind of question, the question needs to be defined, in a short form for display and a long form for explanation and clarity; also each answer needs to be similarly set out in short and long form. For this reason, it is vital that considerable care is taken to ensure that these questions tend more towards mediation than towards polarization.

In principle this kind of question structure can have any number of possible answers. However for human comprehensibility as well as display purposes, 3 is the minimum, 5 is good, and over 9 would feel to me unreasonable from a usability point of view.

2 options would be the absolute minimum possible; however if there are only two, one should consider AORBQ as an alternative.

One of the ways of preventing this question type being misused is to try to make all the lists of options coherent and complete. Incomplete question lists might be like, e.g., “which of the following football teams do you support?” with an incomplete list. It might be OK, for example, to follow a question “Do you support a team in the Premier League?” with a sub-question listing all those clubs, though that question would need to be revised every year so it wouldn't be a very good question.

Another is to give an adequate range of responses. For example, if there were a question “What is your position on Brexit?” it would not be acceptable to have just two answers. Having only two answers would be a classic case of promoting polarization. As a first rule of thumb, all personal position or attitude questions should have at least 5 answers, they should not be able to be split into two clear groups, and they should probably have an “other” or “none of the above” option.

As well as the basic data in the question-info, with QStruct = OPTSQ,

• QDetails comprise:
  • QMultiB: Boolean, mandatory, default=false
    Does the question allow multiple answers?
  • QOtherB: Boolean, mandatory, default=false
    Does the question allow the answer “other” at the end?
• For each of Qni (already given) items:
  • QItemShort: Item short text, for display purposes, less than 80 chars
  • QItemLong: Item long text, explaining the option, if needed

• Use LEVLQ if the options have a clear ordering of preferability or value.

• Template for OPTSQ criteria
• For some spec details, see the HTML site