Types of Questions: Four Building Blocks for Constructing Questionnaires

Sift out the finer distinctions and most questionnaires are constructed from four basic building blocks. These four, fundamental question types are:

Open-ended questions	Essay Questions	Long text responses
	Fill-in-the-Blank Questions	Short text responses
Closed-ended questions	Choose-One Questions	Single choice selected
	Choose-Many Questions	Multiple choices selected

Essay Question

The essay question, in a web survey, is displayed as a multi-line TEXTAREA: 

Respondents can enter a few words, a few paragraphs, and even a few pages. Typically essay questions store 32,000 to 64,000 characters of text. We've had respondents copy and paste dozens of pages of text into essay questions.

This question type is best used for understanding in detail what a respondent believes in their own words.

Fill-in-the-Blank Question

A fill-in-the-blank question is displayed as one or more text boxes with short labels, and is designed for gathering short responses:

It can also be used for contact information or address information:

Responses to text boxes are often validated to follow a common pattern.  Common validations include:

• Email address
• Whole number within a range
• Real number within a range
• Date
• Telephone number - U.S./Canadian format or international format
• Zip codes and postal codes

Choose-One Question

The most common question type is that of the single-select multiple-choice question, where a respondent chooses one and only one of the available options. Choose-one questions are typically shown with radio buttons or dropdown boxes.
While choose-one questions constrain the choices of the respondent, they are much quicker to answer and much easier to analyze.  

Choose-Many Questions

The multiple-select multiple-choice question allows the respondent to check all the choices that are applicable to the question.  Most survey software uses the standard checkboxes of HTML forms to show these questions:
These four questions can then be combined together in matrix questions.
For best practices for each type of question, see these posts:

• Essay-question best practices
• Choose-one question best practices
• Choose-many questions