Survey & Research Glossary
Plain-language definitions of the terms you'll run into designing, running, and analyzing surveys.
Survey Design
Closed-Ended Question
A question with a fixed set of answer choices the respondent picks from — multiple choice, yes/no, or a rating scale — rather than a free-text answer.
Conditional Logic
A rule that shows or hides a specific question in place, based on how the respondent answered an earlier question — without necessarily jumping ahead in the survey.
Double-Barreled Question
A single question that actually asks about two different things at once, forcing respondents to give one answer that can't honestly reflect both.
Leading Question
A question phrased in a way that nudges respondents toward a particular answer, biasing the results rather than measuring an honest opinion.
Likert Scale
An ordered rating scale — commonly 5 or 7 points, from "Strongly Disagree" to "Strongly Agree" — used to measure agreement, satisfaction, or frequency.
Open-Ended Question
A question that lets respondents answer in their own words, with no predefined list of choices to pick from.
Skip Logic
A rule that sends a respondent forward to a specific later question — skipping everything in between — based on how they answered an earlier one.
Statistics
Margin of Error
How many percentage points a survey's results could differ from the true value in the full population, at a given confidence level.
Response Rate
The percentage of people invited to a survey who actually completed it — completed responses divided by invitations sent.
Sample Size
The number of respondents a survey needs for its results to reliably represent the larger population being studied.
Statistical Significance
A measure of how likely a survey result reflects a real difference in the population, rather than random chance in who happened to respond.
Research Methods
Survey Bias
Any systematic distortion in survey results caused by how questions are worded, who gets asked, or how answers are collected — not random error, but a consistent skew in one direction.
Survey Fatigue
The decline in response quality and completion rates that happens when respondents are surveyed too often, or asked to complete surveys that are too long.
Customer Experience
CSAT Score (Customer Satisfaction Score)
A rating question that measures how satisfied a respondent was with one specific interaction — a purchase, a support ticket, an onboarding step — expressed as a percentage satisfied.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
A single-question loyalty metric that sorts respondents into Promoters, Passives, and Detractors based on how likely they are to recommend you, then nets the results into one score from -100 to 100.