David,

My design was to allow the administrator to fill in question ID, question wording,variable name, variable name, value scheme, type (yes/no, multiple choice, -- can't remember if there was a possiblity of more than one choice per question), questionaire number, and question order into one table. (Very often the number on the questionnaire is not the same as the order ie Q5c might be the 15th question.)

Then a child table will be filled in with information about the values for each variable (if there is no predefined scheme like "Very much, Somewhat, Not Much and Definitely Not" these would be stored in a special table with a scheme name and the value would be stored for each of these labels.) If a particular variable doesn't have multiple choice answers then the acceptable range would be stored.

Another child table would have skip instructions. The structure was something like Question ID,Value, and ID of question to skip to. Thus if the person said "NO to question 7 program execution would skip to question 9.

How did I make the screens? On the fly. I might not do it the same way today, but then it was very efficient to display 20 or 40 questions and their answers on the screen at a time and use line 20 to display the current question with an input box for the answer. The user could cursor up and change any previously entered values but the control of execution would be based on the currently showing question and answer box at the bottom of the screen. When the data entry person finished the amount of questions currently showing, the screen would refresh with the next 20 or 40. Everything depended on a reader program to render the correct questions depending on where the entry was and what was the skip logic.

Today with visual, I might try to fill in screen pems from the entered data and design screens that way -- not on the fly but in a generation process after the survey administrator had entered the parameters. Now we can do so much more with screen objects and fonts that screens can be filled in by putting each new question along with the possible answers at a position below the previous one.
And the skip logic could be programmed into a valid clause. The validation logic could be in a text box class that depends on custom properties to contain skip parameters.

Got to go.