Todd Hollander Market Research

Appropriate formatting is a vital component of effective online surveys. The right formatting will engage respondents, make it easier for them to navigate through the survey, and increase the survey response rate. Here are a few tips for how and when to use drop-down lists.

Drop-down list

Drop-down lists typically appear in the survey as a box with instructions to "select one." This type of response format requires the user to click on the box, then locate and click on their answer. Drop-down lists are most appropriate when a) the number of response options is too large to format with radio buttons, and/or b) it is faster or easier for the respondent to select a response from a drop-down list rather than a list of radio buttons. Recommendations:

• Because all of the possible responses are not visible on the initial screen, drop-down options should be used for fields with which respondents are already familiar (such as year of birth or state of residence).
• When many possible responses are included in the drop-down list, it is important to organize response options in a logical way (e.g., alphabetically or numerically).
• Use drop-down lists when appropriate as research has shown that they do not increase the likelihood of respondents giving “don’t know” responses or leaving items blank. ^*

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* Couper, Tourangeau, Conrad and Crawford. “What They See is What We Get.” Social Science Computer Review. http://ssc.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/22/1/111.pdf (2004).

Appropriate formatting is a vital component of effective online surveys. The right formatting will engage respondents, make it easier for them to navigate through the survey, and increase the survey response rate. Here are a few tips for how and when to use checkboxes.

Checkboxes

Checkboxes are used for multiple-choice questions. These response categories usually are not mutually exclusive and are used when multiple answers exist for a single question, as in the example on the left. Note that checkboxes are used when there are lists of options and the user may select any number of choices, including none, one, several, or all. In other words, each checkbox is independent of all other checkboxes in the list, so checking one box doesn’t uncheck the others.

Appropriate formatting is a vital component of effective online surveys. The right formatting will engage respondents, make it easier for them to navigate through the survey, and increase the survey response rate. Here are a few tips for how and when to use radio buttons.

Radio Buttons

In web survey design, radio buttons are represented as small round circles. Radio buttons should be used when the respondent is to select only one answer from a predefined set of options, as in the demographic question on the left: As a rule, radio button responses should be mutually exclusive. A few interesting findings:

• A 2002 experiment in Belgium demonstrated one advantage of using radio buttons. In this experiment, two groups were given the same survey: one with radio buttons and the other with drop-down lists. Participants using radio buttons were more likely to complete the survey (88.37 percent) than those using drop-downs (84.07 percent)1 .
• The use of radio buttons that offer the user noncommittal answers such as “don’t know” did not increase the likelihood of such non-substantial answers being selected1 .

In future postings, we’ll explore how and when to use the alternatives to radio buttons, including:

• Checkboxes
• Drop-down lists
• Text boxes
• Grids

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1Heerwegh and Loosveldt. “An Evaluation of the Effect of Response Format on Data Quality in Web Surveys.” www.icis.dk/ICIS_papers/A2_3_2.pdf (2002) and Social Science Computer Review, Vol. 20, No. 4, 471-484 (2002)