 <p>Depending on the number of options you have, rather than dynamically modifying the value, you could pre-populate your HTML with all of the possible values, and only show the "current" values.</p> <pre><code>&lt;div class="section"&gt; &lt;select&gt;&lt;/select&gt; &lt;select class="hide"&gt;&lt;/select&gt; &lt;select class="hide"&gt;&lt;/select&gt; &lt;select class="hide"&gt;&lt;/select&gt; &lt;select class="hide"&gt;&lt;/select&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </code></pre> <p>Then you can do something like:</p> <pre><code>index = this.selectedIndex; $('.section').find('&gt; select').addClass('hide').eq(index).removeClass('hide') </code></pre>