Closed questions collect quantitative survey data by offering respondents limited answer options. This limits ambiguity and ensures consistency, making them ideal for collecting actionable insights. In addition, they are easy to analyze at scale. However, there are several factors to consider when deciding between open-ended and closed-ended questions.
Easier to Analyze
A closed-ended survey question offer clear-cut responses that can be measured and compared with each other. This makes them much easier to analyze than open-ended responses based on subjective information and can be harder to interpret. For example, open-ended questions may contain emojis, URLs, non-word characters, or misspellings, and it cannot be easy to know what the respondent meant by their response. This type of feedback can lead to incorrect insights and inaccurate results, especially when combined with other survey data types. As such, it is essential to limit the number of open-ended questions in your survey and ensure they align with your research objectives. This will help avoid bias and ensure you obtain accurate insight from your respondents. When you use open-ended questions, following them up with closed-ended questions is essential to provide a complete picture of your respondents. This will make it easy to identify the specific problem or issue and provide a way of collecting actionable data from your respondents. It will also ensure your data is valuable and meaningful for your business. This will enable you to take the proper steps to address any problems that arise from your research and improve your products, services, or customer experience. This will ultimately ensure your customers are more satisfied with their purchases and increase the likelihood they remain loyal.
Quantitative Research
Closed questions allow you to collect easily quantifiable data and can be analyzed in statistics. This allows you to compare the results of one question to another and identify trends in the survey data. This is important for analyzing your data and creating actionable insights. However, closed-ended questions can introduce several biases into your research, such as acquiescence bias and central tendency bias. This is particularly true if the questions are worded too positively or negatively, as this can influence the answers given by the respondent. In addition, if the question is shorter or has an extensive list of options, respondents may become overwhelmed and skip the question. While there are several benefits to using closed-ended questions in your market research, it is essential to use them with open-ended questions to gain deeper insight into customer behavior. Including open-ended questions in your survey will allow you to gather information that is not easily quantifiable and can be challenging to analyze. Still, it will also give you a more complete picture of customers’ thoughts and feelings. In addition, open-ended questions can help you to understand what is going on inside the head of your customer or client and lead you to a more meaningful discussion with them. Open-ended questions can also help you uncover new ideas and opinions you would have needed more than closed-ended questions.
Focused Responses
When a survey respondent is asked to choose from a series of predetermined answers, they must be concise and to the point. This can help avoid confusion or misinterpretation, decreasing the survey response rate and skewing the data you’re collecting. Moreover, closed questions can also help to collect a more structured set of responses that can be easily tallied and used to calculate quantitative metrics such as scores or percentages. Closed-ended questions often include multiple choice options such as ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’ ratings on a scale of 1 to 10, or opinions from Strongly Agree to Disagree Strongly. They are often more straightforward and therefore take less time to answer than open-ended questions. This makes them an excellent choice for boosting your response rates and getting your customer feedback insights on the table quickly. However, while closed-ended questions can offer a quicker experience for your respondents, they can often result in the collection of unfocused and irrelevant information. This can be because a respondent might have an opinion or idea that’s not included in the available answers or because they are influenced by the choices given to them. This can be countered by using open-ended and closed-ended questions to gather a more comprehensive set of insights. This can ensure you get a well-rounded view of your customer’s experiences and opinions.
Easier to Collect Data
Closed questions allow for a predetermined set of responses, which can be easily segmented to obtain statistical data. This makes them ideal for quantitative research. They also make it easier for respondents to answer your surveys. Using closed-ended questions with simple answers like ‘Yes or No,’ ratings from 0 to 10, or opinions from Strongly Agree to Disagree Strongly ensures that your customers can quickly respond. This is helpful to reduce survey drop-off and increase the overall accuracy of your results. However, closed-ended questions can sometimes cause respondents to misinterpret the question, resulting in skewed data. To avoid this, it is essential to write your questions in plain language and clearly understand what you’re looking for from your respondents. Closed-ended survey questions have their place in gathering quantitative customer feedback, but they don’t consistently deliver the insights you need to improve your business. For this reason, it’s often a good idea to use closed questions when possible and then supplement them with open-ended questions to gather more contextual information.
