I'm running into kind of a thorny design problem and I thought I'd ask for a bit of advice.

I have a database that will contain responses to a survey, a series of 16 questions with answers in numerical format from 1 to 5.

What I would like to do, is somehow relate each of those sixteen answers with a record in a different database. There's a few statistics calculations that need to be performed on each question and I was hoping to take that off to a different database file because of the repetitive nature of the calculations.

Is this even possible?

You will need to create a new database for each answer called, say, Answer DB 1, 2, etc. Each AnswerDB will need to have a key field which could be, say, the record number in the ResponseDB for each response. You will also need a database for the response called, say, ResponseDB

Then create a relationship for each AnswerDB in the ResponseDB with the match field being the key field in each AnswerDB. Check "Allow creation of related record" in each relationship.

When you enter the answer in the ResponseDB it will create a new record in the relevant AnswerDB. You should then finish up with all the answers to a specific question in the relevant AnswerDB.

Good Luck!