Comments/ Essay Boxes

What are Comments/ Essay Boxes?

Respondents can enter a determinable amount of text, in response to your set question or statement. They are designed to provide your participants with space to express their thoughts and comments or write a short essay-style answer to a question.

Why include a Comment Box/ Essay Box?

Comment/ Essay boxes allow respondents to form longer, open-ended responses. Therefore, they’re more suitable for questions that require a more detailed answer.

How do I create a Comment/ Essay Box?

1. Open the Form tab in the builder sidebar
2. Click ‘Question’ to open the question type picker
3. Under Standard Questions, select Comments / Essay box
4. Enter your question

Note: This question appears as “Comments / Essay box” in the question picker, but is labelled “Textarea” once inserted into your form outline.

Default Settings

The text box will be set to manage four rows of text by default. You can increase, or decrease, the number of rows using the slider in the question’s settings panel (click ‘Show more settings’ to reveal it). You can allow for between one and ten lines of text.

There will also be no ‘Input Limitation’ set by default, but this can be changed in the same panel. Prefix and Postfix text fields are also available here, letting you display fixed text immediately before or after the response box.

Tips

• These question types are great for providing agency to respondents, especially if they feel they have more to say. However, a large number of text boxes can be mentally taxing.
• Your question should demand a straightforward answer, or participants will become confused.
• Specify what type of information you need to be input into the box, e.g. if you’ve set the box to only accept email addresses, make respondents aware of this.

Question Settings Bar

Clicking a question in the builder expands its settings directly beneath it. For Comments/ Essay Boxes these are:

• Required: This option will appear as a toggle, which can be enabled or disabled. When enabled, it will force respondents to complete the question before they can finish the survey or quiz. When disabled, participants will be able to skip any question. By default, this setting will be inactive.
• Numbered: This button toggles the numbering for the concerned question.
• Link to Contact detail: Choose a contact field to link all responses for this question to, and update the contact record automatically. A ‘Manage contact fields’ button next to it lets you add new custom contact fields.
• Text rows: Customize the size of the textbox (1–10 rows), and therefore the amount of text a respondent can input.
• Prefix / Postfix: Optional fixed text displayed immediately before or after the response box.
• Input Limitation: Control what type of information participants can input. Toggle between ‘None’ (no Input Limitation), ‘Numeric’, ‘Email’, ‘Web Address’, ‘Telephone Number’, and ‘Custom’.

Note: There is no longer a per-question “Personal info” toggle. Instead, a form-wide Pseudonymization setting (Settings tab → Privacy & Security) separates personally identifiable information from the rest of your results across the whole form.

How respondents interact with Comment/ Essay boxes?

An empty text field will be present beneath your set question or statement. Respondents can fill this space with their answer or comment.

Note: Press SHIFT + ENTER to start a new line of text, and just ENTER when done.

How to analyze the Report

The responses for Comments/ Essay Boxes will be listed under ‘Text Responses’ in your Report (the Results tab, previously called the Quick Report). They will be ordered from the newest response at the top of the list to the oldest response at the bottom. For more detailed instructions on analyzing your report, you can visit either of these articles:

• How to Analyze Quiz Results
• How to Analyze Survey Results