Sometimes I notice in my surveys that when adding text entry fields for my multiple choice options (e.g. when asking respondents to specify what their “Other” selection means) my text field is being pre-populated with a 0 and I can’t figure out why.

I know constant sum questions have 0s by default, but this is happening when I allow text entry for my multiple choice options. There are no default choices set to 0 (and why would I do that anyway?), and there is no setting changed in the validation rules to say this value must be numeric.

The behaviour does not happen consistently, but has anyone else seen this and know of a way to stop it happening in the first place. As a work around I clear the values with JavaScript but sometimes that doesn’t seem to work exacrtly as needed if the text box is not present on page load and appears during user interactions.