Default Choices

Suite

Customer Experience Employee Experience Strategy & Research

Product

Qualtrics

What's on this page

About Default Choices

You can use the Default choices feature to pre-populate answer choices within a question when the respondent opens the survey. This can be useful in situations when you ask respondents to update previously collected data, such as mailing address, email, name, etc.

Adding Default Choices

While editing your survey, select the question in which you want to add default choices.

selecting a question and then choosing default choices

In the Question behavior section of the survey editor, select Default choices.

Provide the answers you want to be pre-populated (e.g., a selected choice or specific text).

Click Save.

To clear a default choice, return to the edit default choices window, select Clear, and then click Save.

Questions with default choices will have a gray circle icon located in the top right corner.

the grey circle on a question indicating it has default choices

Qtip: The default choices feature pre-selects an answer choice for your respondent. If a respondent decides to skip this question, then your results will still display data as if the respondent had given an answer. In scenarios where you need to suggest an answer but you want respondents to have the option of a non-response, it’s a good idea to use the force response feature and allow respondents an NA option so they can specify that they don’t want to provide an answer.

Question Compatibility

You can add default choices to the following question types:

Displaying Piped Text in Default Choices

You can use piped text as the default choice in any type of question where the respondent can enter text.

To access piped text in a default choice, edit your default choices and click the blue drop-down menu directly next to any text field. You can then select the type of piped text you want to add.

blue dropdown on the Edit Default Choices menu allows a selection of piped text

Example: Using piped text as a default choice from your contact list can allow respondents to quickly update any personal information without the hassle of remembering or re-entering all the information.

Default Choices in Different Project Types

Default choices are available in just about every type of project. The options described on this page are available in:

FAQs

I want the default answer of this question to be something the respondent entered in a previous question. How do I do this?

Add default choices to the question and use piped text to pull in a previous answer. See Displaying Piped Text in Default Choices for more information.

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