If you want to force respondents to answer all applicable questions in an interview, and you have multiple-choice questions where they are asked to choose responses from a list, you may want to include a response such as “None of these” that respondents can use when they are unable to select any of the predefined responses. For example, if you ask respondents to choose the brand that they normally use from a list of brands, and the normal brand is not one of those listed, respondents may choose “None of these” to continue with the interview.

In order that respondents cannot select this response with any other responses in the list, you will need to flag it as a single-choice response by using the exclusive keyword as follows:

For example:

The interviewing program displays exclusive responses in a bold font as a signal that they may not be chosen with other responses.

Exclusive responses can appear anywhere in a response list, and a response list can contain more than one such response. This often happens when a response list contains the special responses for No Answer, Don't Know, or Refused (see Special responses for details). Also, if the response list is sorted in some way, it is common for exclusive responses to be flagged as fixed so that they always appear at the same point (usually the end) in the list (see Responses with fixed positions in the response list for details).