06. Custom questions

The backend directory

To add questions that haven't yet been added to the MUSCLE infrastructure, you'll have to navigate to the backend directory. It has the following file structure:

.
├── aml
├── experiment
├── locale
├── logs
├── participant
├── requirements
├── requirements.in
├── result
├── section
├── session
└── upload

The backend is written in Python, so a little bit of familiarity with programming is required. Within the backend directory, go to the experiment directory. Within, you find the following file structure:

.
├── actions
├── fixtures
├── management
├── migrations
├── questions
├── rules
├── standards
├── templates
└── tests

The files in the rules directory specify the logic of experiments. We'll turn to those later.

The files in the questions directory contain the questions, as Python classes. For instance, if you look into the file goldsmiths.py you'll see the following:

We have different question types available, all imported from backend/experiment/actions/forms.py:

• NumberQuestion (number field)
• TextQuestion (text field)
• BooleanQuestion (yes/no buttons)
• ButtonArrayQuestion (more than 2 buttons)
• RadiosQuestion (radio buttons)
• DropdownQuestion (dropdown menu)
• AutoCompleteQuestion (dropdown menu with autocomplete)
• RangeQuestion (slider)
• LikertQuestion (slider in which chosen category is displayed on top)

As you can see, the Goldsmith's Musical Sophistication Index uses many LikertQuestions. LikertQuestions can be initialized with a key and a question argument. The key helps us find the responses to the question back in the database, so it's a good idea to use a unique, recognizable key. The key should not contain other characters than numbers, letters and underscores.

The question is the prompt shown to a participant. Here, it is wrapped in a translation tag (represented by _( )): this means the question can be translated into different languages.

If you wish to add questions to the infrastructure, you are of course welcome to so in a fork of the project. However, if you think the questions may be of interest to other users, consider making a git branch and contribute to this repository with a pull request.

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