Open-Ended Questions (Version 2.0)

Abstract

Two aspects of open-ended survey questions are addressed in this contribution. The first aspect is the fielding of such questions: When, and for what purpose, are they useful? Who answers such questions, in the first place? And what should be taken into account when developing and designing open-ended questions? The second part of the article shows possible ways of evaluating open-ended questions. These include content analysis, which has a long tradition in the evaluation of open-ended questions. In addition, computer-supported, dictionary-based content analysis plays a major role as it is especially suitable for the analysis of responses to open questions because they are, as a rule, short and limited by the context of the question. Co-occurrence analysis, which can yield an overall picture of the responses, is a relatively new way of evaluating open-ended questions.