Soft-Required Questions

What is this?

The Soft-Required option reminds a survey respondent to answer a question before moving on in the survey. It will only provide the reminder once, so the respondent can choose to continue without answering the question if they wish.

What’s the difference between a Soft-Required and a Required Question?

A regular “hard” required question will throw up an error message if the required question is not completed. It will continue to do so if the respondent does not fill it out.

A Soft-Required will throw up the warning, but let them pass through the second time they leave it blank.

When would I Use This?

The best time to soft-require a question would be if you have one that is important to your study, but you don’t want to force your respondent to fill it out if they do not feel comfortable doing so. It’s a nice reminder to point out the question in case it was missed by mistake, and also gives your resondent an out if they truly do not wish to answer it.

This can actually help to increase your response rate because it helps your survey takers feel as if they’re not being forced into certain questions. Often times, if there is a uncomfortable question (like personal information, etc) that a respondent may not wish to answer, if they are forced to do so, they will drop off. Soft-requiring a question can help prevent this.

What to avoid

Soft-Requiring a question is best used on questions you’d really like answered, but are not absolutely needed to collect your data. It’s best not to use it on questions where you need an answer 100% of the time (or you base logic on later in the survey).

What does the warning message look like?

The warning message is completely customizable/translatable so you can change it to suit your needs!

Additional Articles Related to Soft-Required Questions

• Quick Tip: Soft-Required Questions