Cascading Dropdown

The Cascading Dropdown chains multiple dropdowns together. When a respondent selects an option in the first dropdown, the second dropdown is filtered to show only the relevant child options — and so on for a third level if configured. This makes collecting hierarchical data clean and error-free.

When to use it

Reach for Cascading Dropdown when:

• data has a strict parent-child hierarchy (Country → State → City, Department → Team, Category → Sub-category → Product)
• you want to prevent impossible combinations (e.g. a city in the wrong state)
• a flat dropdown with all possible combinations would be unworkably long

How to configure it

Open the question in the builder and expand Settings:

• Levels — define each level's label (e.g. "Country", "State", "City").
• Options — for each option at level 1, define which options appear at level 2. Repeat for level 3.
• Placeholder per level — ghost text shown before a selection at each level.
• Required — force the respondent to complete all levels before continuing.

Tips

Tip — Keep cascading dropdowns to 2–3 levels. Four or more levels of dependent selection creates significant friction and increases survey abandonment.

Tip — If your hierarchy has hundreds of leaf nodes (e.g. all cities in all states of a large country), consider whether Short Text with an autocomplete approach would be more practical.