MaxDiff Survey Questions

MaxDiff (best-worst scaling) shows respondents a small subset of items at a time and asks which is best and which is worst. Repeated across several trials, it produces sharper priority data than a single Likert battery because respondents are forced to discriminate between similarly rated items instead of rating everything highly. It is well suited to prioritization studies, feature or message testing, and issue-importance research with many candidate items.

Use MaxDiff when you have too many items for a clean ranking task and need to know which items separate from the pack. If you only have a handful of items, Ranking or Grid Matrix may be simpler for respondents.

• Item pool: the full list of items being evaluated (use at least four).
• Items per trial: how many items are shown together in each set.
• Number of trials: how many sets each respondent completes.
• Best / worst labels: customize the column headers respondents see (for example, "Most important" and "Least important").
• Balanced-random trial design: Domandata draws each respondent's trial sets from a shuffled pool so item exposure stays roughly even across the sample, without requiring a hand-built experimental design.

1. Step 1: Open Block Builder. Open the survey and select the block where the prioritization task belongs.

   Step 1: Open Block Builder

2. Step 2: Add a MaxDiff question. Choose MaxDiff from the question type selector.

   Step 2: Choose MaxDiff question type

3. Step 3: List the item pool. Add every item under consideration. A larger pool benefits more from MaxDiff than a short list does.

   Step 3: List the item pool

4. Step 4: Set items per trial and trial count. Four to five items per trial and four to six trials is a common starting point; more trials improve precision but add respondent burden.

   Step 4: Set trial design

5. Step 5: Name and code it. Add a readable variable name before piloting so the per-trial columns are easy to interpret in export.

   Step 5: Variable Name

6. Step 6: Preview the trials. Confirm each set shows a sensible number of items and that best and worst selections are mutually exclusive within a trial.

   Step 6: Preview the trials

Each response exports the item shown in every trial along with which one the respondent marked best and which they marked worst. Domandata does not automatically compute best-minus-worst scores or a utility model — plan to aggregate best/worst counts per item during analysis, the standard approach for MaxDiff data.

• Constant Sum Survey Questions for magnitude-based tradeoffs
• Ranking Survey Questions
• Survey Variable Names and Recodes
• Export Research Survey Responses