Multiple Selection

This survey field is also designed for creating questions with several preconfigured answers for participants. However, participants are able to choose more than one of the choices provided. If you want to limit the participants to one choice, you should use the “Single selection” survey field. Multiple selection survey feature is also referred to as Check box feature on the web.

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Tip:

when using a multiple selection survey field, it’s a good idea to let your participants know that they can select more than one choice. You can even restrict the maximum amount of choices the participant can select. For example, you could set the maximum number of choices a participant can select from five options to two out of five. If you decide to use limitations, it’s recommended to inform your participants about it in your question.

Both “Multiple Selection” and “Single 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” Multiple 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 Multiple 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.

Note:

You should consider the copyright of the images that you are uploading. SurveyLegend does not and cannot accept any responsibility concerning the images that survey creators upload and use in their surveys. It’s all the responsibility of the individual creator! Read more…

There is a lot you can do, using pictures in your surveys or forms. See how to empower your forms or surveys with pictures and nice images. Have a look at this page to get some inspiration about using images as answers, makeing your surveys branded with illustrations, logos or signs, and more… With SurveyLegend, it’s so easy to create visually appealing questionnaires that get a very high finish rate!

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.

This feature is coming soon for Multiple Selection
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.

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.

Multiple Selection offers several voting types, helping you get different types of feedback. You can choose between Multiple or Limited from the voting type dropdown menu.

Each vote type has its own advantages, here are the following advantages and examples of user cases.

Multiple

The respondent can select an unlimited amount of choices. For example, they can choose 6 out of 10 choices, or even vote for all 10 choices presented to them.

By default, respondents are not limited and can select several choices per question. However, as a survey creator using Multiple Selection, you can set limitation of choice for them.

Limited

Choosing this voting type will allow you to limit the number of respondent’s votes. This is a perfect feature if you want the respondent to choose for example “the top five”.

Using the “Require to select” slider, you can specify how many choices a respondent ‘has to’ choose (from 1-10).

When you turn this feature ON, by default the Max value of the slider is set to the max number of available choices. So if you provide 10 choices, and then turn the “Limited” settings on, the slider is already at 10. Drag it to the value you intend.

Note: using this voting type will automatically turn on Answer is required setting.