Designing Conjoint Experiments in Qualtrics

While I often help colleagues with Qualtrics questions in general, I’m increasingly being asked about designing and programming conjoint experiments within the platform. Designing the ideal conjoint experiment can be challenging at first because it requires knowledge of the Qualtrics platform as well as some familiarity with HTML and Javascript. While there are many resources online, they do not always meet researchers needs.

While working as the lab manager for the Laboratory for the Study of American Values at Stanford, I made a template survey with how-to instructions to help out the lab members. I have made it available for download here.

When you click the link, it should download a .qsf file for the survey. You will upload the .qsf to your Qualtrics platform to create a new survey with my design, code, and instructions. While I made this with a candidate choice experiment in mind, this basic set up works for other use cases (e.g., product design, public policy).

I have put notes in the survey using both the question text and the question Javascript. You must read through everything carefully to fully understand how the conjoint design functions in the survey platform. This should provide the foundation needed to modify and add to my example so that you can create your ideal conjoint experiment!

Note: if using this resource, please cite this post.