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The different types of questions
The different types of questions
Emilie Roze avatar
Written by Emilie Roze
Updated over a week ago

In a Supermood survey, you can ask your employees a variety of questions. To help you make the best choices, you'll find here all the types of questions available, their benefits and their applications.

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In this article:

Open questions (comments)

Open-ended questions are the most familiar: they are simply answered with a comment. They allow you to gather qualitative data.
These are the only optional questions (employees can answer the survey without writing a comment).

Benefits

  • Free speech: They open the door for employees to be free to express themselves in their own words.

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  • Context: They allow teams to provide context to understand a field situation or their perspective on a topic.

  • Useful ideas: They are a good source of ideas to overcome the challenges your teams are facing.

  • Bonus: As they read the comments, managers can react on the spot.

Limitations

  • Lengthy analysis: Since open-ended questions are qualitative (and not quantitative), their analysis is rich but more complex and above all longer - although it is made easier by the detection of themes and tones via our analysis tools.

  • Lack of tracking: It will not be possible to obtain an evolution of feelings over time or a benchmark.

  • Low participation: Answering an open-ended question takes more time and thought. Given their optional nature, it is common to obtain a lower participation rate for open-ended questions.

💡 Pro tip

Open-ended questions can provide a lot of qualitative material. Therefore, we recommend that you limit the number of open questions to two per survey to allow for a smooth analysis.
⇒ Learn more: Building a cohesive questionnaire

Closed questions (scores)

These are the ones that are answered with a score. They provide quantitative data that is easy to track and compare.

Benefits

  • Score tracking: Scores means metrics! Closed-ended questions produce averages for each team, which can be compared to each other or to the overall score and can be tracked over time.

  • Steering tool: They are essential for steering a company strategy, whatever its scale (group strategy or monitoring of local metrics).

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  • Score assessment: They allow you to identify the nature of the score (good/bad), and to benefit from the heat map's features.

  • Benchmark: By using the Supermood library's closed-ended questions, you give yourself the opportunity to obtain benchmarks to better understand where you stand.

  • More participation: Finally, on the participant side, they are quick and easy to answer.

Limitations

  • Lack of context: By nature, closed questions do not allow participants to provide more depth to their answer. Care must be taken to frame the question to avoid misinterpretation (Phrasing a closed-ended question).

💡 Pro tip

The choice of your question's scale is very important. We advise you to use the 1 to 5 scale as much as possible - to make it easier for the employees when taking the survey, and for the management team when analyzing it.

Closed questions, with comments activated

These hybrid questions combine the best of both worlds: they are first answered with a score, and then you have the option to add a comment to give context to that score.

Benefits

  • Combo: They have both the advantages of closed questions and those of open questions.

  • Even more context: As a bonus, they offer the possibility of attaching a given comment to the type of rating that its author has selected (positive, neutral, etc.)!

Limitations

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  • Lengthy analysis: While enabling comments is a great way to add depth to your team's responses, be sure to use this feature sparingly to avoid an overly arduous analysis.

💡 Pro tip

Given its benefits, this feature can be a victim of its own success and lose importance when overused. You may want to reserve it for broad questions that deserve context or a hot topic for which you are looking for action ideas, for example.

MCQs

Multiple-choice questions consist of a list of checkboxes. These questions are very quick to set up and fill in, but provide less material for analysis.

Benefits

  • Decision support: They can be used to highlight a choice among defined options, or to identify general opinion trends.

Limitations

  • Weak analysis: The results are in percentages, not scores. The evolutions, the comparisons by team (including in the heat map), and the benchmark will therefore not be available. Your analysis will be strongly limited.

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💡 Pro tip

Avoid the MCQ format for questions related to employees' feelings. A closed question, with a scale from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree", will simplify employee positioning and give you more possibilities for analysis (comparison by team, evolution, benchmark, etc.).

Yes/No questions

Yes/No questions are simply predefined MCQs: the choice labels are automatically filled in ("Yes" and "No"), and the number of allowed answers is set to 1.

Benefits

  • Simple choice: Useful to make a clear choice, or to take a decision on a simple subject.

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Limitations

  • Weak analysis: You will find the same limitations as for the MCQs in general: as the results obtained are not scores, it is not possible to compare them to overall scores or between different demographic groups. Also, no evolution over time or benchmark will be available.

💡 Pro tip

As with the MCQs, it is possible to modify a Yes/No question. For example, you can add an "I have no opinion" option if it is relevant.

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