Open-ended questions: Enrich your data with more context

What type of data are you looking for in your survey?

It’s an important question to ask.

Do you need your responses to be exact, quantifiable and predictable? Or do you need responses with more depth and colour but less structure?

Usually, you’ll need to strike a balance between the two,

and that’s where open-ended questions come into play. Although multiple choice questions are great for obtaining quantitative data, giving your respondents the freedom to answer your question in their own words can provide information that you hadn’t considered before.

It can also help you explain or illustrate some of the trends that you’re tracking so that you can see your data in a different light.

For example, let’s suppose that you want to learn more about your respondents. It’s easy to use closed-ended questions to obtain demographic information such as age, sex or ethnicity. But what happens if you ask for the same information in a different way?

“Tell us about yourself.”

In all likelihood, if you ask this type of question, you will obtain something more interesting than basic demographic information. That’s the main advantage of open-ended questions: they collect data that you can’t obtain in any other way.

While the example above probably can’t replace the standard demographic questions, it might be a great complement to give you a more colourful picture of your respondents.

So what are open-ended questions?

Open-ended questions ask people to provide answers in their own words and are designed to elicit more information than is possible in a multiple choice or other closed-ended format.

Writing a good open-ended question is a tricky balancing act: it should encourage the respondents to answer with useful information but also give them the freedom to respond as they choose.

If you’re conducting a survey, you’re interested in hearing about your individual respondents’ opinions and experiences. A lot of this important information can be collected via multiple choice questions or dropdown questions, where respondents select the response that most closely aligns with their own from a set of options.

These questions are great when you want to collect qualitative or quantitative data that you can aggregate and analyse, such as when you’re tallying the percentage of your respondents according to their gender or age range.

But maybe the questions that you’re asking don’t have responses that fit neatly into a set of categories. What if you want to give your respondents a chance to offer feedback, to explain their responses to previous questions or just to vent? If that’s the case, you’ll need to use an open-ended response question.

For example, this market research template contains open-ended questions asking customers to list specific things that they like and changes that they would like to see:

In this second example, notice how this local community events survey template uses an open-ended question as a follow-up to a closed-ended question.

1. How often do you attend events in your local community?

2. If you do not attend events in your local community, why not?

You probably won’t be able to compile results from open-ended questions into charts or statistics, but you will be able to read through your responses to learn more about your respondents. If some responses crop up again and again, you can use a word cloud to display those results.

In general, it’s best to ask the most essential questions in multiple choice format for easy analysis and then use open-ended questions to get more detail or colour.

Usually, your multiple choice questions will be intentionally narrow in scope (e.g. “What is your age?”, “What is your ethnicity?”) but your open-ended questions will have more room for interpretation (e.g. “Tell me about yourself.”).

Your respondents will usually surprise you. Even if you think you’ve written an effective survey that will collect all of the important information, asking one last open-ended question may still reveal something novel.

Similar to offering an ‘Other’ option for a multiple choice question, providing at least one open-ended question in your survey will help you leave no stone unturned. Your respondents may think of something that you didn’t!

Letting people answer in their own words can be empowering. If you give your respondents the opportunity to really express themselves, e.g. to complain about a bad experience that they had or to praise a good one, they will be grateful.

Everyone likes to know that their opinions are valued; after all, that may be why they’re taking the survey in the first place.

They’re hard to analyse. If you’re planning to compile your results into tables or charts, you should not rely on open-ended questions.

You’ll end up having to manually code each response, which is a time-consuming and potentially bias-inducing process. Instead, you should consider open-ended questions as complements to the multiple choice or other questions that form the core part of your survey.

They’re not mobile-optimised. Any question requiring a text response is difficult to answer on a smart phone or tablet. Open-ended questions are particularly challenging because they are looking for long responses of several sentences or paragraphs, which simply involves too much typing on a small screen.

Too many of them can adversely affect your response rate. Taking the time to thoroughly answer an open-ended question might not sound like much, but it’s not easy to read an unexpected question, think through your opinions and come up with a coherent response on the spot.

Asking too many open-ended questions can fatigue or frustrate your respondents, making it more likely that they will become get lazy when giving their responses or even drop out of the survey altogether. Be selective with your use of open-ended questions.

You should always be mindful of the fact that the specific type of data you’re looking to obtain from your survey will determine the type(s) of questions that you ask.

The best surveys use a variety of question types in order to generate lots of different data. Whether you’re asking customers for feedback about your business or conducting a survey on your local community, you’ll probably need to include both closed-ended and open-ended questions. You should use closed-ended questions to get the facts and figures you’ll need for your analysis and then follow up with open-ended questions to fill in the details.