A 1000minds survey lets you ask additional questions: who participants are, their experience, whether they’re eligible, and any comments. These answers are what let you compare groups, describe preference clusters and filter your results.
But many questions only make sense for some people. Say we’re surveying farmers – we don’t want to ask a deer farmer about their flock of sheep, or the beef farmer about milk production. With survey branching, each participant sees only the questions that apply to them, and your results stay clean enough for serious analysis.
Our aim is to avoid any need for a second survey tool alongside 1000minds, and our guiding principle for this project was “usability first, with powerful options for those who need them.”
Follow-up questions in a click
Suppose you’re surveying farmers about their breeding objectives. The first question asks which species they farm: sheep, beef, deer or dairy... Each species has its own follow-up questions, and then everyone answers a final question about how long they’ve been farming.
On the Customize page, each answer option’s menu now has Add follow-up section, next to Screen out. Choose it for Sheep, and 1000minds adds a section directly below the question, headed with the option’s name and already set to “Only if Species is Sheep”. Do the same for Beef, Dairy and Deer, add your questions to each section, and you’re done.
Because the species question uses checkboxes, a farmer who runs both sheep and beef will tick both boxes and will see both sections. After these sections, the survey carries on with other questions without needing a rule to say so.
Sections and show-if rules
Behind the scenes, branching uses “show-if” rules: Only if [an earlier question] is [any of these options]. A rule can sit on a section – a group of questions within a page – or on a single question. Anything not subject to a rule is shown to everyone.
For more complex surveys, a rule can have several conditions, and you choose whether participants must meet all of them or at least one. Rules can depend on answers from an earlier page, even across the main exercise, so a question on the final page can be asked only of participants who said at the start that they farm sheep.
The editor shows you at a glance what depends on what: each section and question shows its rule in its header, and the question it depends on carries a marker naming what it shows.
Built to protect your data
Editing a questionnaire is where survey logic usually goes wrong, so 1000minds refuses changes that would quietly alter who sees what. A rule can only depend on an earlier question, so loops are impossible. It won’t let you move a follow-up above the question it depends on, delete an answer option a rule uses, or change that question to a type without options.
All at once, a section at a time, or a question at a time
For the Post-intro and Pre-complete pages, you choose how questions are presented: all on one page, one section at a time, or one question at a time. With all on one page (the default), follow-up questions appear and disappear as participants answer. With the step-by-step layouts, participants move through with Back and Next buttons and a progress bar, going straight past anything that doesn’t apply.
Participants can change their minds freely. If someone unticks Sheep, the flock questions disappear, but their answers are kept out of sight in case they tick it again. Answers to questions that no longer apply are discarded only when the page is submitted.
“Not applicable” is not “Not answered”
This is where branching matters most for analysis. A question that a participant’s answers ruled out is not the same as one they left blank – survey researchers call the first a “legitimate skip”. 1000minds keeps the two apart throughout.
Suppose 100 people complete the farming survey, 40 of them tick Sheep, and 2 of those leave the flock-size question blank. The results page shows:
| Breeding ewes | Count | Share |
| Under 500 | 14 | 37% |
| 500–2,000 | 16 | 42% |
| Over 2,000 | 8 | 21% |
| Not answered | 2 | |
| Not applicable | 60 |
The shares are of the 38 participants who answered. Without the “Not applicable” row, the 60 participants who don’t farm sheep would look like missing data.
The same meaning carries through cross-tabulations, cluster descriptions and filters. Each counts a question only among the participants it applied to, so filters and results always agree. In the Excel export, not-applicable questions are left blank.
A short name for every question
Every question has a short name, which is what rule pickers, results tables, charts, filters and the Excel export show. When you write a question, AI suggests a short name from its text. Press Tab or Enter to accept it, or type your own.
Getting started
Survey branching is available now. Give it a go with a fresh survey and try adding a Post-intro or Pre-complete page so you can experience the all the new presentation options. If you’d like help designing a survey with branching, get in touch.
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