NC State University Libraries Support for FLE

How do I design a survey?

Survey Design in Google Forms

I have a topic! What kind of questions should I use in my form?

You may have an idea of what type of information you want to gather with a form, but there are several different types of questions you can use. They fall into two categories:

Closed-ended questions

Closed-ended questions give the respondent a limited number of ways to respond.

Examples include:

Yes/No Questions

- Did you drink coffee today?
- Do you have a pet?

Multiple Choice

- How many siblings do you have? (none, one, two, three or more)
- What is your major?
- What’s your class ranking? (first-year, sophomore, junior, senior, other)

Scale

- How often do you cook? (Every day, more than three times a week, less than three times a week, more than once a week, once a week, never)
- How difficult was this quiz? (Very easy, easy, difficult, very difficult)

When to use closed-ended questions

You might have very specific questions about the people taking your survey and want to be able to directly compare their answers with each other.

Think about what you would like to do with the answers (the data) after you finished collecting it. Here is the same question as an open-ended question and a closed-ended question:

Shows a multiple-choice question where respondents can only answer "first-year," "sophomore," "junior," or "senior." These responses create a nice bar chart with only four categories.

This survey asks "What is your class standing" as a multiple choice question.

Notice that the answers are grouped in a way that will allow you to make a bar chart.

Shows a survey question with an open text box, and the many different answers that come up for the same question. There are misspellings, different capitalization, and other differences that create a confusing bar chart.

This survey asks "What is your class standing" as an open-ended question.

Notice that there are many different ways to type in the same answer.

Open-ended questions

Open-ended questions allow the respondent to answer and give as much information and context as they would like.

Examples include:

“What is your favorite meal?”
“Why did you choose to enroll at NC State?”

When to use open-ended questions

You want to learn more about your respondents’ ideas, opinions, or attitudes. You might interpret the answers, but you don't need to directly compare them.

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