Requiring answers

This is a feature used extensively in most professional digital or traditional surveys. However, the good thing with digital surveys is that you can make sure your survey participants will not be able to forget to answer specific questions, before they submit their responses to you. We have made it easy to require an answer from participants by turning on Required answer in the survey field settings. Therefore, if participants miss such questions and click on the “Next page” or “Submit” buttons, the system will gently remind them to give answers to those compulsory questions.

Tip:

Try to limit the use of required answers. Consider doing so only on key questions to avoid a high drop-off rate.

One of the benefits of conducting an online survey is that you can require that certain questions be answered. However, some survey creators tend to activate this feature for all questions in their form, when they realize this is possible. But, we don’t recommend this. There are a number of reasons that respondents do not answer particular questions in almost every survey. These include:

Respondents don’t feel qualified to answer,
They might be afraid to answer. They might feel insecure that they can be identified and the survey conductor(s) may find out how they responded.
They are apathetic about the issue being raised in the question, and do not feel the importance of answering.
They forget to answer.

When respondents are repeatedly asked to complete their answers, some of them will definitely get upset. Some may respond randomly, just to continue, and others may just give up and leave the survey. To minimize their frustration, we indicate the required questions with an asterisk icon whenever answering is required. But we also want to remind you not to overuse this feature, so that respondents who fall into the categories mentioned above can immediately proceed using the “submit” button, and send you their feedback. Demanding required answers is available in: Survey Field: Text box