Question Skipping and “No Opinion”

Over the last few days we’ve written a few posts about providing a Neither Agree Nor Disagree option on surveys and a “No Opinion” option on surveys. Today we’ll look at another option – simply allowing the user to skip the question.

Both NAND and No Opinion have one serious problem – they tend to give people an “out” so that they don’t have to think about the question, and simply select “no opinion” quickly in order to move on to the next question and get the survey over with. By excluding a “no opinion” option, you force them to critically think.

But if you simply leave it off and force people to answer the question, you run the risk of frustrating those that truly have no opinion, and possibly lead to problems with your data. Question skipping is another option, and one that could potentially solve this issue. By allowing users to skip questions when they have no opinion, they can still move on rather than be forced into answering.

However, when they are presented with a question, they won’t see that option, so if they select an answer they will have had to form an opinion. That should lead to more reliable data.

This does, however, create one potential problem – namely, users may notice that they can skip every question in the survey and still get the incentive. It would be unfortunate if several respondents simply clicked through the entirety of the survey without filling out a question, only to be rewarded. Similarly, not every individual is going to realize they can simply skip a question, and they may still be frustrated over not having an option that meets their belief even though they can skip the question.

Furthermore, not everyone that skips the question is going to have no opinion. Some people may simply not want to answer, or the question may not be applicable, or they don’t know what to say. Those people are going to be presented as having no opinion, but that conclusion would be inaccurate.

Once again, the question comes to personal research practices and your own beliefs about surveys and survey research. There is no definitive right or wrong answer, and in most cases you will still get meaningful results no matter what choice you make. Just be aware that your decisions do have the potential to cause problems down the road.