KnowHow: Forms: Marital Status

Forms

For some studies it might be neccessary to ask for the marital status and find out whether people do have partner or not, depending on the hypothesis. 

 

Marital Status as drop-down menu With drop-down menus one can save a lot of space and kinda pretend to have a short survey. However, one should still be careful applying drop-down menus and consider that a user needs more time to choose the appropriate answer in a drop-down menu than in choosing the right radio button or a check box. In some cases drop-down menus are, on the other hand, the only choice, especially when the list of possible answers to choose from is rather long. From cognitive psychology we know that the human being is able to comprehend up to six elements at the same time, hence drop-down menus should only be used with more than 7 possible answers.   This is what it could look like: Your marital status: Please choose Single Married Co-habitating Divorced Widowed     HTML-Source <p>Your Marital Status:<br> <select size="1" name="zugriff"> <option value="0">&nbsp;Please choose</option> <option value="1">&nbsp;Single</option> <option value="2">&nbsp;Married</option> <option value="3">&nbsp;Co-habitating</option> <option value="4">&nbsp;Divorced</option> <option value="5">&nbsp;Widowed</option> </select>

Marital Status with radio buttons To display the marital status with radio buttons is surely the best alternative. Simple list Your marital status:  Single  Married  Co-habitating  Divorced  Divorced     HTML-Source <p>Your Marital Status:?<br> <input type="radio" name="marital_status" value="1"> Single<br> <input type="radio" name="marital_status" value="2"> Married<br> <input type="radio" name="marital_status" value="3"> Co-habitating<br> <input type="radio" name="marital_status" value="4"> Divorced<br> <input type="radio" name="marital_status" value="5"> Divorced<br>