Why is My Question Locked?

If a question has collected at least one response, a lock icon appears in its toolbar in the builder. Clicking it shows a message confirming the question is locked because responses have been collected:

This lock only appears on questions with a fixed list of answer options (Multi-Choice, Dropdown, and similar question types). Questions without discrete options — such as Opinion Scale or Star Rating — don’t show this lock, since there’s nothing structural to add, remove, or reorder.

Questions are locked once they’ve collected responses for two reasons:

Response Consistency: Changing question wording or answers whilst a project is live may incur differing answer selections from your respondents. Those who selected answers before the change may have chosen something completely different if the question/answers had originally been written that way, and vice versa.

Protecting your Results: You can still make cosmetic edits — modifying the question text, images, or certain settings. However, the following changes are not allowed while the question has responses:

• Adding options
• Deleting options
• Changing the order of options
• Some settings

To make these changes, you must first delete all responses associated with that question. You can do this from the lock message itself using the ‘Delete responses’ button — note this action cannot be undone.

Read more about the changes you can make to a live project.