This forced-choice pairs survey template asks youth program staff to choose between two statements at a time, so you find out where the team really leans instead of watching everyone agree with everything. The pairs are printed in the one statement per line style, which gives every statement the full width of the page instead of half a column, because the statements here are complete sentences. It has 12 questions and prints on two pages.
What this survey measures
The seven pairs at the heart of the form set a relationship-building view of youth work against a skills-and-outcomes view. One statement says young people do best when an adult here knows them well, the other says they do best when they leave with a skill they can name, and staff mark the box beside whichever comes closer to how they see the work. Both statements in every pair are defensible, which is the point: a rating scale would collect a page of agreement, while a forced choice makes the trade-off visible. Which of the two lines carries which view changes as you go down the block, so nobody can answer it by picking every first statement. Four short background questions follow, covering tenure, role, contact hours, and the age group each person mostly works with.
Every relationship statement is worth one point and every skills statement zero, and the seven pairs are grouped as one scale that totals from 0 to 7. The bands read as leaning toward skills and outcomes, balanced, or leaning toward relationships. Because each answer is a choice between two things rather than a rating of one, the total says which orientation is stronger inside a person, not how strongly they hold either view. Use it to compare orientations within a person and across a team, not as an absolute level of anything.
How to use it on paper
Print the form and hand it out at a team meeting, in supervision, or at the start of a training day. Each pair prints as two lines, one statement per line across the full width of the page with an empty box to the left of it, and the instruction is printed once above the whole block. Staff mark one box in each pair with a blue or black pen. Scan the completed forms in a batch and PaperSurvey reads every mark, totals each person's orientation score, and shows the distribution and the pair-by-pair split in your dashboard.
Customize this template
Rewrite the statement pairs for the tension you actually want to surface, such as safety against independence, or fidelity to the curriculum against responsiveness in the room. Keep both statements in a pair equally attractive, keep them roughly the same length, and go on swapping which of the two carries which view. You can add or remove pairs and adjust the score bands to match, change the background questions, or run the same form as a web survey alongside the printed one and analyze both together. If you shorten the statements, switch the block to one of the two side by side Pairs layouts, which print the two statements next to each other with a box above each one, with or without a divider between the boxes and the text.
Preview the PDF above, or use this template to run it with your team this week.