Are Open-Ended Questions Tying You in Knots?
Volume
37
Issue
4
Abstract
Customer surveys are the mainstay of the Extension Service and have always served as conduits for collecting feedback about planned, ongoing, or concluded projects. While it is most desirable to design survey questions where respondents can categorically indicate their preferred answers, there are instances when a researcher wants to capture unbiased, unconstrained, and thoughtful responses via open-ended questions unavailable by any other means. Unlike structured questionnaires, which are easily handled by most statistical software, responses to open-ended questions seem to defy programming logic and are usually treated as ordinary character strings by computer programmers. This paper shows a possible technique for dealing with open-ended question responses without the time-consuming collation associated with them.
Recommended Citation
Santos, J. A., Mitchell, D., & Pope, P. (1999). Are Open-Ended Questions Tying You in Knots?. The Journal of Extension, 37(4), Article 12. https://open.clemson.edu/joe/vol37/iss4/12
