What is the difference between and open and a closed question and what are their advantages and disadvantages?

A survey questionnaire consists of many categories of questions. Amongst the different types of questions, open-ended questions and close-ended questions come under a category. While writing survey questions you may include both open-ended as well as close-ended questions. When you are conducting a field survey or interview, it is effective to ask open-ended questions. It gives the respondents the liberty to answer in their own way and you get more additional details. Whereas when you want someone to choose from a few things or restrict their answer to definite options, you can go for close-ended questions.

Table of Contents Show

What are open-ended questions?
Advantages of open-ended questions
Disadvantages of open-ended questions
What are close-ended questions?
What are open-ended questions?
Advantages of Closed-Ended Questions
Disadvantages of Closed-Ended Questions
Learn more about the Customer Feedback

What are open-ended questions?

An open-ended question is the type of question that does not restrict the answer to specific options. The respondent can answer however he wants and as much as he wants. These types of questions are mainly useful for the qualitative research method.

An example of such a question is, “How do you feel about the involvement of technology in every sphere of our lives?”

In this question, the person whose responses can write in any way he wants and express his thoughts completely.

Advantages of open-ended questions

It gives the liberty to the respondents to answer freely.
Answers are not restricted to only a definite one.
Through this question, the researcher can better understand the respondent and his thoughts.
You can gain more information from it or additional beneficial information.
The researcher does not need to make relatable choices for responses. Making multiple choice questions need a great deal of thought so that respondents can relate to them and answer.
The researcher does not need to quantify or statistically describe the data in many cases.

Disadvantages of open-ended questions

Since these questions demand descriptive answers, it might become time-consuming to answer these. This is the most prominent disadvantage of open-ended questions.
You cannot quantify the data or statistically represent the responses. This is another big disadvantage of open-ended questions.
Each response generally requires individual analysis. It is hard to analyse all the responses together.
One more disadvantage is less response rate. Respondents may be reluctant to answer descriptive questions.

What are close-ended questions?

Close-ended questions are the ones where you have to answer in a certain manner and from the options given. The respondent needs to choose an answer from the options that are provided. These types of questions are mainly useful for collecting and analysing quantitative data.

An example of a close-ended question is, “Do you think environmental studies are important in educational institutions?”A) YesB) No

C) Maybe

The difference between open-ended and close-ended questions is that close-ended questions provide a specified range of questions that the respondent must choose from, while open-ended questions allow respondents to respond as they wish. To get a better idea of these two types of questions, let’s take a closer look at each.

What are open-ended questions?

Open-ended questions are questions that cannot be answered with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and instead require the respondent to elaborate on their points.

Open-ended questions help you see things from a customer’s perspective as you get feedback in their own words instead of stock answers. You can analyze open-ended questions using spreadsheets, view qualitative trends, and even spot elements that stand out with word cloud visualizations.

A wordcloud generated from open-ended question responses to "What do you like about Hotjar?"

Closed-ended questions are questions that can only be answered by selecting from a limited number of options, usually multiple-choice questions with a single-word answer , ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or a rating scale (e.g. from strongly agree to strongly disagree).

Closed-ended questions give limited insight, but can easily be analyzed for quantitative data. For example, one of the most popular closed questions in marketing is the Net Promoter Score® (NPS) question, which asks people “How likely are you to recommend this product/service on a scale from 0 to 10?” and uses numerical answers to calculate overall score trends.

Quantitative data from a closed-question nps survey

Whether you’re part of a marketing, product, sales, or user research team, asking the right questions through customer interviews or on-site surveys helps you collect feedback to create better user experiences and—ultimately— increase conversions and sales.

As a rule of thumb, the type of question you choose depends on what you are trying to achieve:

Ask a closed-ended question when you want answers that can be plotted on a graph and used to show trends and percentages. For example, answers to the closed-ended question “Do you trust the information on [website]?” will help you understand the proportion of people who find your website trustworthy versus those who do not:

Ask an open-ended question when you want to develop a better understanding of your customers and their needs, get more context behind their actions, and/or investigate the reasons behind their satisfaction/dissatisfaction with your product. For example, the open-ended question “If you could change anything on this page, what would it be?” allows your customers to express, in their own words, what they think you should be working on next:

Most closed-ended questions can be turned into open-ended questions with a few minor changes. Here’s an example: on the left- hand side, you have closed-ended questions; on the right-hand side, each question has been tweaked into an open-ended version that allows respondents to elaborate further.

All the closed questions in the left column can be answered with a one-word answer, specifically Yes or No.
These answers can give you the general sentiment of each user and a few useful data points about their satisfaction, which can help you look at trends and percentages

—for example, did the proportion of people who declared themselves happy with your website change in the last 1, 3, 6, 12 months?

The open-ended questions in the right column give customers an opportunity to provide additional information and help you understand the context behind a problem or learn more about your USPs (unique selling points) instead. So if it’s qualitative data like this you’re after, the easy way to convert closed-ended into open-ended questions is to think about the range of possible responses and re-word your questions to allow a free answer.

🔥 Pro tip: when surveying people on your website, ask questions that can help you find out both the what and the why behind your users’ actions. You can accomplish it by combining open- and closed-ended questions as part of the same survey:

Start from a closed-ended question, which usually costs people little effort to answer
Continue with a follow-up open-ended question, which gives them an opportunity—should they want to take it—to elaborate on the answer.

An example of closed-ended and open-ended question from one of our blog pages

📚 Read more: here are 20+ real examples of open- and closed-ended questions you can ask on your website.

Closed-ended questions are survey or feedback form questions that provide customers some predefined choices of answers to choose from which may be in the form of options like Yes or No, ratings from 0 to 10, opinions from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree, or a range of options depending upon the context of the question. Basically, the customer is not free to write his opinion in his own words and can choose one or multiple options among the provided choices.

When designing a survey, you can choose different types of survey questions. You can choose to ask closed-ended questions or open-ended questions. Both have their own pros and cons.

You can read our article to understand in detail when to use open-ended vs. closed-ended questions.

In this article, we focus on closed-ended questions explaining their advantages and disadvantages in detail.

Advantages of Closed-Ended Questions

There are many advantages of using closed-ended survey questions, especially when you desire to receive a high response rate from your busy customers. Let’s review them here.

Easier and quicker to answer
Closed-ended questions can be answered easily without consuming much time as the customers just need to select one of the available answer options. They don’t need to think much and write the answers in their own words.
Help in obtaining measurable and quantitative data
Closed-ended questions are perfect when you need to have quantitative statistics because there will be a fixed number of answer options and you can easily ascertain the number of people selecting each option.
Better understanding through answer options
At times, some customers do not fully understand the question but when they look at the available options of answers, they get clarity of what is being asked.
Customers are more likely to respond
Due to paucity of time, people nowadays avoid filling out time-consuming feedback forms, but when they are provided with answer options to choose from, they usually fill the form which helps in having a better response rate.
Help to get rid of irrelevant answers
When open-ended questions are asked, the chances of irrelevant answers increase which makes it difficult for you to gather and analyze feedback data. On the other hand, closed-ended questions have predefined relevant answers to choose from.
Comparable answers
The answers to these questions are easy to compare because only predefined answer options are available for the customers to choose from. You can easily compare the response of various demographic groups with each other.
Can be customized easily
Closed-ended questions are easy to replicate and modify as per the requirement. They can be customized on the basis of the type of survey, type of organization, type of products and services it provides, and response required, etc.

To understand better using some closed-ended questions examples, you can try out our readymade survey templates tool:

Disadvantages of Closed-Ended Questions

While there are plenty of advantages, there are also some drawbacks to using close-ended questions. Let’s review them here.

Unable to provide detailed information
This has to be the biggest disadvantage of closed-ended questions. With the help of closed-ended questions, you can get to know the ratings of the customer experience but not the details of it. Even if you give options regarding the reason for the rating, the customer cannot actually tell his full experience and why he rated low/high.
Cannot help to receive customer opinions
Closed-ended questions cannot provide you the information regarding what exactly the customer thinks and feels about your organization and the products/services. This hampers you from getting real customer insight.
It is not possible to cover all possible answers
Every customer is different and has his own unique view. Even after trying your best to cover all possible answers in the options, there are high chances that the answer desired by the customer is not available there. In such a situation, customers can get irritated and leave the survey in between or may choose a similar answer.
More choices can create more confusion
Sometimes, there are so many choices for the customers to answer that he gets confused about what to answer.
Can suggest answers that the customer may not be thinking
There may be a case where a customer would not be even thinking about a particular aspect or idea, but the options in the closed-ended questions make him think in a completely different way.
Customers having no opinion will also answer
It may be possible that a customer doesn’t have any opinion or knowledge about a particular aspect but just to complete the survey and give feedback, he chooses one of the available answer options. This can give you false information and irrelevant customer feedback data.
Not possible to find out if the question is misinterpreted
If a customer misinterprets a question and answers accordingly, it would not be possible to ascertain that he has misunderstood unlike in open-ended questions where you can have an idea about the misinterpretation of a question by reading the answer from the customer.