I've been working on a CBC survey for a while and lurking in the forums/reading technical papers. I think I'm getting closer to finishing it off but there's some lingering challenges in the CBC portion that I want to make sure I'm doing correctly. Apologies if these questions are a bit long, I just wanted to provide the proper context.
My survey is a transportation survey asking users to pick between 5 alternatives each time (car, bike, two transit variants, and taxis). I'm primarily varying the transit and taxi alternatives since they're the focus of my research. With this in mind:
1. I base the in-vehicle travel times (IVTT) off their current auto and cycle times (taxi is always the same as auto, transit will be up to 3x longer than auto to account for different stopping patterns). IVTT varies for transit, but not for auto, cycle, or taxi, so I'm mostly using them as reference. For these non-changing attributes, I have two levels for the attribute but nothing changes (I just have a blank space on the second level so that I don't get errors for duplicated level labels, but the output to the user is the exact same following the macOS -- Apple example from the ACBC tutorial).
Is this the right way to go about doing this? And is there still a way to get some idea of how users value that time in comparison to other attributes, or is that something I give up by keeping it static?
2. I have one prohibition currently set up, which is for transfer times and number of transfers on the transit variants. Right now I have it set up to suggest 0-2 transfers, and the times can be from 0-30 minutes, but you can't have 0 transfers and >0 minutes (e.g. 0 transfers and 10 minutes per transfer), because I found my pilot survey testers were rightly getting confused by the combination.
Ideally I'd like to do this without prohibitions to keep it easier to build a more efficient survey instrument, so I was considering collapsing this into one variable (0 transfers, 1 transfer with 0 minutes, 1 transfer with 10, etc.), which would result in somewhere upwards of 9-11 levels based on my current structure. I'm cautious about being able to effectively test these combinations effectively if this becomes 1 attribute with many levels, and about my ability to still test later how sensitive people are to *just* transfer time per transfer or *just* number of transfers.
Is there a recommended way to go about making sure I can still extract this data, or is it better to stick with the prohibition, keeping in mind that I'm also using alternative-specific designs?
Thank you! Much of what I've read here has been immensely useful.