Single Selection

This survey field lets you create questions with several preconfigured answers for participants. Participants are able to choose only one of the choices that you provide. If you want to give an option to your respondent to type an answer which does not exist among your preconfigured ones, you can always “Enable other” option. Enabling “other” adds a text box in which your respondents can type in their own answer. This type of questions are also known as “Open-Ended” questions.

* Is it OK for you, if we use your personal data such as your health status which you provide when filling out this questionnaire (in accordance with our privacy policy as explained in the beginning)?

Example above shows how the a Single Selection question can be used, to obtain consent from respondents; which is necessary when making your surveys compliant with GDPR.

Note:

If you want to let the participants select more than one choice, use the “multiple selection” survey field. Single selection survey feature is also referred to as “Radio Button feature” on the web.

Both “Single selection” and “Multiple selection” questions, are also known as “Closed,” or “forced-choice” questions. Because they offer a limited number of responses from which the respondent can choose the best answer or choose more than one best answer. These two types of questions are used for distinct purposes and require the evaluator to analyze and interpret data in distinct ways.

Generally, Open-ended questions are questions that do not provide response options. When you ask a respondent to answer in his/her own words, you are using an Open-ended question. When you enable the “other” choice, you are converting the “Closed” single Selection question into a kind of Open-ended question.

But keep in mind that the narrative type of responses collected via Open-ended questions can be more complex and harder to analyze. Also, it will be harder to make a report from the responses, and illustrate them nicely. Such answers usually require more interpretation than well-designed forced-choice questions.

We also recommend you to read the following guide about writing professional survey questions, where we explain advantages and disadvantages of using closed and open questions in details:

Writing professional survey questions

Settings

After adding a Single Selection question to your survey, click or tap on it to activate the Edit Mode and access the settings panel.
You can easily customise the Single Selection, to ask the type of question that works best for your questionnaire. Single Selection offers the following customization possibilities:

By enabling this settings, you will demand the respondents to answer this question. So when this setting is ON, we notify the respondents with a visual clue, that they cannot continue to next page or submit the survey, before answering the question, which in this case is choosing only one of the choices provided.

Read more about when you ‘should’ or ‘should not’ make answering compulsory in your online questionnaires.

Enabling this setting will allow you to add a large, edge-to-edge image right under the question. If your question needs further explanation using a picture or illustration, you can easily upload it here. Read more about best practices of adding pictures to survey questions.

Additionally, you can add a custom link to the picture after you upload one. Linked images can act as banners, helping you promote something or add incentives for your respondents to finish a survey. They can also help you create download links, or lead users to other pages or your other surveys. Read more about adding links pictures in your survey.

Sometimes you may need to explain further, or add tips or instructions for your respondents. Enabling this feature will activate an extra text box in which you can type these instructions. By default, these additional instructions appear as a little button with a question mark inside them, right under the question text. When clicked, they expand and show your additional text.

Instead, if you prefer to constantly display this text, please activate “Always visible instructions” option. This will directly display the additional instructions under the question, and respondents do not have to manually click on it to display it. Read more about adding further instructions or tips for survey questions.

Enabling this randomizes the order choices appear each time the survey is loaded for each respondent. This can be used to avoid order-bias, which can happen sometimes when some respondents disappointingly choose the first or last choices from a list, because those are very easy to spot.

Make sure to read more about randomizing order of choices, and learn when & why to use it, or when to avoid it.

Enabling “other” gives you great advantage if you want your participants to express themselves more freely regarding your question at hand. Respondent’s manually added answers will be shown all together, as a group in Live analytics, called “Other”. To be able to view them one by one, you need to export your survey data.