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 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)