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:
Common uses for open-ended questions include :
These are all directive questions, aimed at eliciting a specific type of response to a defined issue. In addition, non-directive questions can be asked, such as what, if anything, comes to mind when the respondent is shown a visual prompt, and whether there is anything else that the respondents want to say on the subject. Questions that ask ‘What?’ or ‘How?’, or for likes or dislikes, will commonly be open-ended.
Open-ended questions are easy to ask and suffer from several drawbacks:
In addition, some commentators see the verbosity of respondents as a problem with open-ended questions. It is argued that if one respondent says only one thing that he or she likes about a product, but another says six things, then the latter respondent will be given six times the in the analysis. To even this up, only the first response of the more verbose respondent is counted. In practice, interviewers are trained to extract as much as details from the respondents at the open-ended questions. The objective is to identify the full range of responses given by all respondents and to determine the proportion of the sample that agrees with each of them.
To analyse the responses, a procedure known as ‘coding’ is used. Manual coding requires a sample of the answers to be examined and the answers to be grouped under commonly occurring themes, usually known as ‘code frame’. If the coder is someone other than the researcher, then that list of themes needs to be discussed with the researcher to see whether it meets the researcher’s needs. The coder may have grouped answers relating and to value for the money together as a single theme, but the researcher may see as distinct issues and want them separated. The researcher may be looking for specific responses for the specific responses to occur that have not arisen in the sample of answers listed. It may be important for the researcher to know that few people mentioned this, but in order to be sure that this is the case, the theme must be included in the code frame. When the list of themes is agreed, each theme is allocated a code, and all questionnaires are then inspected and coded according to the themes within each respondent’s answer.
Manual coding is a slow and labour-intensive activity, particularly when there is a large sample size and the questionnaires contain many open-ended questions. Most research agencies will include a limit to the open-ended questions in their quote for a project, because it is such a significant variable in the costing.
There are a number of computerized coding systems available, which are increasingly used by research companies. These reduce but do not eliminate the human input required, and so make some cost savings.
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