Survey Questions

Choosing the Right Type of Survey Question

The way you ask for information and the survey question type you choose play a big role in creating a successful survey. Before you start developing survey questions, be sure to determine how you intend to use the answers from your survey. Knowing the goals of your survey and the information you would like to collect will help guide which survey question type to choose.

Popular Survey Question Types

Below are some of the most commonly used survey question types and how could be used to create a great survey. To see what each type of survey question might look like, visit the sample survey questions page.

Multiple Choice Questions

This question type allows the survey taker to select one or more options from a list of answers that you define. You should use multiple choice questions when you have a fixed number of options.

Dichotomous Questions

Dichotomous survey questions are binary questions, limiting the survey taker to two options (typically “Yes/No”). To gain additional insight, you can add an optional comments box.

Rating Scales

With rating scale questions, the survey taker selects a single rating for your question along an equally spaced continuum of possible choices. Customer satisfaction survey questions often use a rating scale to measure customer opinion or attitudes.

Rank Order Scales

This survey question type allows survey takers to rank items in order of preference by selecting a numeric value for each answer prompt. Each numeric value can be used only once and you can add a “Don’t Know” option to ensure respondents select a rating for each item. A rank order scale is often used when creating employee satisfaction survey questions.

Open Ended Survey Questions

Open ended survey questions requires the respondent to type their answer in, and does not provide specific pre-set answer options. Responses are then viewed individually or by sophisticated text analysis tools, such as Zoomerang’s Open Ended Question Analysis tool.

Demographic Questions

To gather information about a respondent’s background, income level for example, demographic survey questions would serve you well.

Constant Sum Questions

A constant sum question is a survey question type most commonly used to understand how much your customers spend. For example, you could record how much customers spend on food in a typical month, with a total sum provided automatically.

Once you get the hang of it, you will quickly know which survey question and answer type to use and why—and the technical names will no longer elude you. In the meantime, survey creation tools from Zoomerang can help you choose the right survey questions.

Eliminating the Guesswork of Survey Questions

Most of us are better at interpreting results than building the perfect survey, so we are fortunate that creating a survey with Zoomerang is fast and easy. Start by using one of our hundreds of free, professionally-designed survey templates. These survey templates were built by professional survey designers and have all the survey questions placed appropriately within the survey for you to edit.

To start asking the right questions and collect great feedback, Sign up for Zoomerang Pro today for only $199/year.