How to write survey questions: 10 tips to get clear, honest answers

Collecting accurate and actionable data relies heavily on writing well-designed survey questions. When you dedicate time to crafting good survey questions, you set yourself up for reliable responses that help you achieve your objectives. Effective survey questions clarify intent, minimize bias, and encourage honest feedback from respondents.

We’ve created this guide to help you understand best practices for creating effective survey and poll questions—ones that generate useful insights and data. Read on for 10 tips for writing better survey questions.

The first step to writing great survey questions is to define your objective. Clarifying your goal will help you craft a meaningful survey or questionnaire that gathers the data you seek.

Your goal may be to measure employee satisfaction. Or, it might be to track your brand perception. Whatever your goal is, it will influence the types of questions you ask respondents. 

For example, if you want to track brand perception, you may use a Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) or Net Promoter Score (NPS®) survey to understand customers better. These types of survey questions support your goal of tracking brand perception and measuring customer satisfaction.  

Pro tip: Share your goal in the survey introduction to help respondents understand why their feedback matters.

Before drafting any questions, it is crucial to know and understand your audience. The demographic of your respondents directly influences the appropriate tone, complexity, and format.

For example, a teacher must adjust question phrasing and reading level dramatically when shifting from surveying college students to middle schoolers.

Furthermore, the survey type influences your question strategy. A brief customer satisfaction survey might leverage shorter, experience-focused questions to capture immediate impressions, while an academic or in-depth research study often requires more detailed, open-ended questions for deeper qualitative insight.

Pro tip: For maximum accuracy, always draft questions in plain, everyday language, even for highly knowledgeable audiences. Clarity is paramount for reliable survey results.

If you are looking for data that is easy to capture and analyze, closed-ended questions can be your ticket to success. Closed-ended questions generate quantitative data that can be used to measure variables. The answers to closed-ended questions are always objective and conclusive. 

Another benefit is that the data derived from this question type can be presented in very accessible formats, showing overall percentages of how respondents answered—graphs and charts are best.

Open-ended questions generate qualitative data, which requires respondents to invest more effort and time in answering compared to closed-ended questions. Qualitative data is often more time-consuming to analyze because it does not generate clear-cut numerical results. 

In general, when writing a survey, you should try to avoid asking more than two open-ended questions per survey or poll. No doubt, open-ended questions can generate extremely useful insights, but it’s important to be strategic in the ways you use them to get the maximum benefit.

Pro tip: If possible, put open-ended questions on a separate page at the end of your survey. That way, even if a respondent drops out of the survey, you’re able to collect their responses from the questions on previous pages.

Including an opinion in your question prompt is equivalent to asking a leading question. Leading questions can damage your survey data because they may influence respondents to answer in a way that doesn’t accurately reflect their true feelings.

For example, say you asked the leading question:

“We think our customer service representatives are really awesome. How awesome do you think they are?” 

The question seems to convey an opinion that you want respondents to agree with. Do you know if your respondents actually feel like your customer service representatives are awesome? 

If you’re looking to get feedback on your customer service representatives, then this can be a serious problem because you’re not giving respondents the opportunity to refute the fact that reps are awesome. 

You can make the tone of your survey question more objective by editing it as follows:

“How helpful or unhelpful do you find our customer service representatives to be?”

Pro tip: Watch for subtle wording that may impact responses. When in doubt, read your question out loud and ask yourself if it implies a “correct” answer. 

Related reading: Types of bias in research + how to avoid them 

Respondents need a way to provide honest and thoughtful feedback. Otherwise, the credibility of their responses is at risk.

The answer choices you include can be another potential source of bias.

Let’s assume we included the following as answer options when asking respondents how helpful or unhelpful your customer service reps are:

You’ll notice that there isn’t an opportunity for respondents to say that the reps aren’t helpful. Writing good survey questions involves using an objective tone. This means adopting a more balanced set of answer options, like the following:

Pro tip: Aim for symmetry in your scales. If there are two positive options, make sure there are two negative options to maintain an equal weight. A balanced scale ensures that respondents don’t feel nudged toward a specific side. 

Confusing respondents is equally as bad as influencing their answers. In both cases, they’ll choose an answer that doesn’t reflect their true opinions and preferences.

A common cause of confusion is the double-barreled question. It asks respondents to assess two different things simultaneously. For example:

“How would you rate our customer service and product reliability?”

Customer service and product reliability are two separate topics. Including both in the same question can push the respondent to either evaluate one or to skip the question altogether. Either way, you will be hard-pressed to get an answer that is useful or relevant. Your products may be extremely reliable, but what is weighing on a respondent’s mind is a recent bad customer service experience.

Fortunately, there’s an easy fix here. Simply separate these two topics into their own closed-ended questions:

This approach helps you pinpoint problem areas while also getting a clear sense of where you are meeting or exceeding customer expectations.

Pro tip: If you catch yourself using “and” or “or” in your questions, double-check to be sure you’re not asking a double-barreled question. 

Imagine if someone asked you the same question over and over and over again. You’d probably get annoyed, right? That’s how respondents may feel if you repeatedly ask questions that use the same question prompt or answer choices. It leads respondents to either leave your survey or engage in straightlining, which is answering your questions without putting much thought into them. 

A thoughtless answer can be more damaging than no answer at all, as it does not represent the true feelings of the respondent. You can proactively address this by varying the types of questions you ask, how you ask them, and by spacing out questions that look similar. Using one of our expert-written survey templates can help you present a variety of questions posed in different ways to avoid this pitfall. 

Pro tip: Use at least three types of survey questions and alternate them to keep respondents engaged. 

Respondents may not know the answers to all of your questions. And there may be some questions they simply don’t feel comfortable answering. But you still want them to take the survey and provide valuable feedback.

Keep both of these things in mind when deciding which questions to require answers to. And when you’re unsure whether to make a certain question optional or required, lean toward making it optional. We’ve found that forcing respondents to answer your questions makes them more likely to quit your survey or select an answer at random.

Pro tip: Only require responses to questions that are absolutely essential to your goal. Make other questions optional to help boost completion rates and get the data you need. 

As a survey creator, there’s no worse feeling than finding mistakes in your survey once it's already sent to respondents. In some instances, this may require you to scrap the survey altogether and start anew. Another option might be to send a revised survey, but this can reduce trust and participation among respondents, potentially creating a scenario in which some people complete the original survey while others respond to the revised version. 

Prevent the situation from happening to you by sharing your survey in advance with colleagues, friends, and anyone else who can be a fresh set of eyes for you. An objective opinion of a reviewer can be all it takes to spot mistakes in your survey. Having others review the survey can also weed out any potential bias that might be offensive or off-putting to a particular demographic.

Pro tip: Have your test group talk through their thought process as they answer each question. This gives you context into confusing wording and can reveal issues you wouldn’t catch by reading the survey yourself. 

Survey length can significantly impact completion rates and data quality. Forty-eight percent of survey respondents say they are willing to spend 1-5 minutes to complete a feedback survey. That’s why it’s so important to only ask questions that support your goal. Avoid unnecessary questions to keep your survey brief and manageable. 

Pro tip: Take the survey yourself and time how long it takes you to complete. If it’s more than 10 minutes, consider cutting out some of the questions or creating two separate surveys. 

Writing a good survey means asking questions in a way that lets respondents answer truthfully. At the same time, it means providing respondents with a quick and easy survey-taking experience. The better your surveys get, the better your responses become. 

Explore our resources for creating and analyzing surveys, no matter who you’re trying to reach. Check out SurveyMonkey’s 400+ questionnaire templates to help you get started!

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