An open-ended question is an open question where the response is recorded verbatim. An open-ended question is nearly always an open question. (It would be wasteful to record yes-no answers verbatim.)Open-ended questions are also known as ‘unstructured’ or ‘free response’ questions. Open-ended questions are used for a number of reasons: The researcher cannot predict what the responses might be, or it is dangerous to do so. Questions about what is liked and disliked about a product or service should always be open-ended, as it would be presumptuous to assume what people might like or dislike by having a list of pre-codes. We wish to know the precise phraseology that people used to respond to the question. We may be able to predict the general sense of the response but wish to know the terminology that people use. We may wish to quote some verbatim responses in the report or the presentation to illustrate something such as the strength of feeling that respondents feel. In response to the question ‘why will you not use that company again?’, a respondent may write in: ‘They were that awful. They mucked me for months, didn’t respond to my letters and when they did they could never get anything right. I shall never use them again.’ Had pre-codes been given on the questionnaire this might simply have been recorded as ‘poor service’.The verbatim response provides much richer information to the end-user of the research. Through analysis on the verbatim responses, clients can determine if the customer is talking about a business process, a policy issue, a people issue (especially in service delivery surveys), etc. This enables them to determine the extent of any challenges they will face when reporting the findings of the survey to their management. Common uses for open-ended questions include : Likes and dislikes of a product, concept, advertisement, etc; Spontaneous...