Closed-ended vs. open-ended questions: Best practices, tips and examples

When constructing a survey, researchers have two main question forms to choose from: either select closed-ended questions, which generate structured, quantifiable data; or open-ended questions, which offer insight into the “why” behind certain opinions or ideas.

Understanding how to use closed-ended and open-ended questions effectively is vital when creating a rich survey. In this article, we’ll explore closed-ended and open-ended questions, when to use each and tips for getting more from these question formats.

An open-ended question is a type of question where respondents can write out any opinion they like. Instead of choosing from a limited number of responses, they have complete freedom to say as much or as little as they would like. 

When creating a survey, you can add a textbox question type to allow people to share their opinions. Open-ended questions are a great choice if you’re looking to generate data for qualitative research.

Open-ended questions can be extremely useful when businesses want to better understand the “why” behind certain opinions. However, using too many open-ended questions could lead to low survey response rates, as they require more effort to complete.

Here are some of the pros of using open-ended questions:

On the other hand, here are some of the cons of using open-ended questions:

The key to overcoming these cons is understanding the situations that open-ended questions are best suited to.

There are several situations where open-ended questions are useful in surveys. 

A common example of an open-ended question is immediately after a closed-ended one. This open-ended question will ask someone to justify or explain their reasoning for giving a certain answer to the closed-ended question. These could be optional or mandatory, depending on the data type you’re looking to generate.

Another type of open-ended question that you can use in a survey is when there is a large volume of potential answers. Instead of trying to think of every possible answer to a question and listing it in a closed-ended format, you can use an open-ended question instead. In the example below, you can see that a respondent may have a number of reasons for finding their job satisfying. 

This question works well as an open-ended one, giving the respondents the flexibility they need.

Open-ended questions are also a useful final question module to add to your survey. You can use them to give respondents space to write any comments, ideas or insights that they didn’t have the opportunity to share in your survey. Although not every survey respondent will use these final questions, they are always useful, just in case.

Closed-ended questions offer respondents a limited number of answers to choose from. Typically, they use a multiple choice format, where a user selects the response that most closely aligns with their own opinion.

Closed-ended questions are useful when conducting quantitative research, as all of your answers will fit neatly into the potential options you’ve created.

Closed-ended questions are useful when businesses want to rapidly generate lots of data and make the survey process easy for respondents.

Here are some of the pros of using open-ended questions:

However, there are also some cons associated with closed-ended questions:

You can overcome many of the cons associated with closed-ended survey questions by pairing them with open-ended questions. The flexible nature of open-ended questions helps to fill in any gaps that may occur in your closed-ended questions.

There are several different types of closed-ended questions that researchers can use in surveys.

For example, the Net Promoter Score® (NPS) survey, an industry-standard metric for tracking customer loyalty, uses a closed-ended question as the basis for the entire survey. The NPS question offers respondents the opportunity to answer on a scale of 0–10.

Closed-ended questions typically use worded or numeric rating scales. The NPS survey falls on the numeric side of closed-ended questions. However, word responses can also be closed-ended. Here’s an example of a survey question that offers users a small selection of potential worded responses. 

Closed-ended questions can also be interactive. In ranking questions, researchers ask participants to put a small selection of answers in a certain order. For example, the following survey question asks respondents to rank TV programmes from their favourite to least favourite. 

Closed-ended questions can even be as simple as giving a star rating. When you rate a restaurant, movie or book on a scale from one to five stars, you are actively engaging in a closed-ended question format. 

Open-ended questions aren’t necessarily better or more effective than closed-ended ones and vice versa. Getting the most out of these types of questions boils down to understanding the type of survey you want to create, your research goals and what information you want to obtain from respondents.

Here’s what you should consider when deciding whether to use open-ended or closed-ended questions.

The questions that you use in a survey will directly influence the data and insights that you produce. One of the best ways to decide how to write your survey questions is to consider whether quantitative or qualitative research would be more useful for you.

If you want to analyse survey data to reveal trends in plot relationships, then closed-ended questions may be more effective. On the other hand, open-ended questions may be more useful if you want to understand why your customers think a certain way. 

Thinking from the perspective of a respondent will help shape your survey for the better. SurveyMonkey research demonstrates that keeping your surveys short is vital for boosting response rates. With that in mind, you may want to limit the number of open-ended questions in a survey. As these take longer to fill out, they may frustrate users if you add lots of them.

One way to use open-ended questions without burdening your audience is to make them optional. Although it might be nice to get extra information in response to certain questions, it won’t make or break your survey. In that case, just include an option for open-ended questions. Your most enthusiastic respondents will take the time to give you extra information, while speed-finishers will skip over it.

Requiring answers to every single question will slow down your audience. This is particularly relevant given that many people will probably respond to your survey on their mobile device and may exit prematurely if a lot of typing is required.

While closed-ended questions are great for rapidly generating data, they can also miss out on a key piece of the puzzle. If you want to understand the “why” behind your data, add one or two open-ended questions.

Qualitative insights are vital for understanding the logic behind certain trends in your data. Although data can sometimes speak for itself, the additional insight that qualitative research from open-ended questions can provide is extremely useful.

Open- and closed-ended questions each have their own time and place. But together, they can provide comprehensive insight that stretches across quantitative and qualitative research.

Here are three tips for using open and closed-ended questions effectively. 

Whether you opt for the open- or closed-ended approach, your priority should always be writing clear, unbiased questions. Your questions should be unambiguous, unbiased and simple to understand. Where possible, use straightforward language and remove any superfluous clauses in your writing.

Good survey questions should also avoid any leading language. You don’t want to introduce bias into your survey by including loaded questions. 

If you’d like to skip the hassle of writing your questions, you can simply use a SurveyMonkey survey template or pick from our thousands of pre-written ideas in our Question Bank.

The answer scale that you select in a closed-ended question is extremely important for the final data you produce. Simple responses, such as agree/disagree questions, may be far too restrictive to represent a respondent’s opinions. 

Instead, you should aim to introduce a degree of flexibility in your closed-ended questions. Wherever you can opt for a larger number of selections, do so. A wider range of options will help your respondents find the exact response that aligns with them. 

That said, it’s also important not to take this too far. If you asked someone to choose how they feel on a scale of 1–1,000, then you would have introduced so much variability into your answers that they would risk becoming meaningless. 

A powerful function of surveys is that you can use analysis tools to rapidly produce useful insight for your business. As your data floods in, you’ll see in real time where your customers sit on your closed-ended response scale.

However, analysis isn’t just limited to closed-ended questions and quantifiable research. Your business can automatically sort open-ended questions with rule-based tagging, helping to radically analyse open-ended questions to find out how respondents really feel.

With Natural Language Processing technology, you can conduct sentiment analysis on your open-ended questions, bringing precision to a previously more subjective form of data research. 

Both open-ended and closed-ended questions are useful question formats that help produce a wide range of data. Learning to use these questions at certain times will help you generate the necessary information, translating into better research across the board.

With SurveyMonkey, you can use our survey template, resources and analytical tools to produce reliable, actionable data in a fraction of the time. Get started today.  

NPS, Net Promoter and Net Promoter Score are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld.