Survey Questions

Get It Right from the Start. Choose the Right Type of Survey Questions.

Survey Question Types Illustration

When you're looking for insights, it's important you start off on the right foot. How you get information and the survey question type you ask play a big role in creating a successful survey. Before you start creating survey questions, ask yourself how you intend to use the answers from your survey. Knowing the goals of your survey and the information you'd like to collect will guide which survey question type to choose.

Popular Survey Types

Below are some of the most commonly used survey question types and how they can be used to create a great survey. To see what each type of survey question might look like, visit the sample survey questions page.

Multiple Choice Questions

This question type allows the survey taker to select one or more options from a list of answers that you define. You should use multiple choice questions when you have a fixed number of options.

Rating Scales

With rating scale questions, the survey taker selects a single rating for your question along an equally spaced continuum of possible choices. Customer satisfaction survey question often use a Likert scale to measure customer opinion or attitudes.

Comment/Essay Box Question

Open-ended survey questions require respondents to type their answer into a comment box, and do not provide specific pre-set answer options. Responses are then viewed individually or by sophisticated text analysis tools, such as SurveyMonkey's Open Ended Question Analysis tool.

Demographic Questions

To gather information about a respondent's background or income level, for example, demographic survey questions would serve you well.

Once you get the hang of it, you'll quickly know which survey question and answer type to use and why — and the technical names will no longer elude you. In the meantime, survey creation tools from SurveyMonkey can help you choose the right survey questions.

Take the Guesswork Out of Survey Questions

Most of us are better at interpreting results than building the perfect survey. It's a good thing that creating a survey with SurveyMonkey is fast and easy. Start by using one of our hundreds of free, professionally designed survey templates built by expert survey methodologists. Or create a survey from scratch with the help of our expert-built tool, Question Bank. Either way, you're sure to have a survey or questions our survey methodologists say will leave you with unbiased results. Promise.

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