What are Single-Choice Questions? Definition & Example

In an empirical survey, only those response options are meaningful that can be clearly interpreted in the final evaluation. When designing the questionnaire, care is therefore always taken to ensure that the questions considered are appropriate, objective and unambiguous. With single-choice questions, these requirements can be met most easily.

General Definition of Single-Choice Questions

Single-choice questions (= single selection) are a form of closed-ended questions in which respondents must choose exactly one answer from predefined categories. The simplest subcategory of single-choice questions is characterized by yes/no response options:

Question: Do you have children?
Answers: "Yes" or "No"

Typical Use of Single-Choice Questions

In empirical research, closed single-choice questions are among the most common question types, and they are well suited for all scale levels – from simple ordinal scales to complex ratio scales. With single-choice questions, various content can be determined. Frequently encountered (but by no means exclusively!) are interval-scaled single-choice questions with predefined hierarchically arranged response options. This allows the intensity of the personal perception of test subjects to be recorded:

How interested are you in football?

Response options:

1. Very much
2. Much
3. Moderately
4. Little
5. Not at all

With such data, the most common statistical procedures can be performed in data evaluation. Therefore, interval-scaled single-choice questions are extremely popular especially in social science studies.