Understanding the usage of open ended questions

Open ended questions provide genuine viewpoints: The answer provided by a respondent for an open ended questions are fully designed and framed by the respondent. There is no limitation and the respondent can express their idea and thoughts freely, without being restricted by pre-defined answer choices. Moreover, such viewpoints vary from person to person, thus, making the collective opinions more comprehensive and ensuring coverage of each and every perspective.

High utility for qualitative information: Qualitative aspects such as ideas, suggestions, feedback etc are more fully expressed when conveyed using open ended questions. There is no pre-requisite understanding of the type of information and so, open-ended questions de-limits the respondent allowing them to narrow down on each and every area of their answer.

Respondent engagement: Unlike closed ended questions, open ended questions puts the respondent mind to work. They ask the respondent to frame and convey their thoughts in their own way. This also hints towards the knowledge possessed by the respondent with respect to area under consideration.

Inserting open-ended questions is also used as a mechanism for testing the awareness and concentration of the respondent. Answering close-ended questions is a matter of choosing an option through a click. Sometimes, respondents tend to skim through the survey without paying much heed to the question or the option that they are choosing as their response. This is not the case with open questions wherein the need to put in a greater amount of effort and thought.

Using open ended may be a good option to understand the unrestricted opinion of your target audience, however, using open-ended questions does come with certain drawbacks of its own.

Firstly, analysing open ended questions is not easy task. This is the reason why closed ended questions are considered a better alternative as they can be easily evaluated using statistical and data analysis techniques. Techniques such as thematic analysis is used to make sense out of text based data. Conducting manual analysis of text based data involves studying each and every response which is a long and complex process.

Secondly, respondents tend to give very small answers just for the sake of completing the survey. This hinders the complete understanding as there is very little information provided due to which such respondents might need to contacted to supplement their answers with additional reasoning. Respondents that are skimming through the survey might even skip the question altogether.

Open ended questions also suffer from language and structuring issues. Respondents might understand the question and may even know the pointers they’d like to include, but explaining the same thing in the form of a continuous answer may be something they’re not used. This results in a collective pool of responses with varied degrees of usability: some might be correctly framed and may include all the necessary details while others may be distorted answers unable to convey the entire meaning.