Skip to main content
Every indicator is measured through one or more questions. A question is more than its wording. A few properties decide how the question is asked, where it appears, and what it feeds into. These are the same properties you see when you open Edit question on a question card in Plan.

​
Wording

The prompt is the actual text a respondent sees (or hears, if they’re using voice). You can edit the wording of any suggested question before you send a study out. See Plan. Some questions, especially ones taken verbatim from a validated scientific instrument, are marked to stay as close to the original wording as possible, since changing them would break comparability with the source they’re drawn from. Questions voi writes itself follow a shared set of wording principles, such as asking about one thing at a time in neutral, everyday words. See How questions are worded.

​
Question type

Each question is one of:
  • Single select: pick one option from a list.
  • Multi select: pick any number of options.
  • Likert scale: choices ordered from one end to the other, like “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”.
  • Numeric scale: a rating on a slider or number picker across a defined range.
  • Number: a count, an amount or a duration, which the respondent types with its unit beside it, such as hectares or hours. A number question can have a lower and an upper bound, and with both set you can show it as a slider instead. voi refuses an answer outside the bounds.
  • Open text: a free-form answer, with no fixed options, answerable by text, voice, or video. See Languages & accessibility for how open-text questions handle language and literacy.
The first three always come with a fixed set of answer choices. See Answer options & scoring for how those are built.

​
Where a question sits

Every question sits in one of the outline’s three question sections: Warm-up, Core or Closing. Questions that cover your outcomes go in the core, grouped outcome by outcome in the order of your Theory of Change, and a question that decides whether another one appears always comes before it. You can drag a question to another place or section in Plan. Every scored question feeds exactly one indicator, shown as the outcome it maps to when you open a question’s full editor in Plan. That link is enforced end to end, which is what makes it possible to trace an indicator score straight back to the individual answers it was built from, in Analyse, in Explore, and in a Report. Nothing is ever a standalone number with no answers behind it.