Before going more into this topic, it is preferable to know more about open-ended questions and where they are mainly applied. They are a list of survey questions that do not have a list of response options. This is known for being an open-ended question.
Why are they made, you may ask yourself? The answer to that question is simple; they require the respondents to formulate their own answers, to express themselves best on the matter that is being asked, in other words, to express themselves verbally or as a writing method.
The respondents may be asked to give a numerical response, face-to-face questions, or they may be given a paper to fill out the answers. When they are developed, researchers often have the problem of whether it is best to formulate these kinds of questions.
It is often decided based on what the researchers are trying to achieve with the survey. If they need to see how the respondents are thinking, it is a good idea to implement this survey method. Open-ended questions can be implemented to collect additional information and motivate candidates to think outside of the box.
They are used for various purposes, and if you want to read more into this, you should click on the following link for more information https://medium.com/@getthematic/best-practices-for-coding-open-ended-questions-dfaa3d55c205
Good for various purposes
For example, this survey is very good for knowledge measurement. If you are trying to test out the knowledge of your candidates, this method is very efficient. On the other hand, closed-ended questions have some answers, and candidates will often try to guess the right answer even if they do not know the correct one.
There is no “correct answer in this method,” but it is more important how the candidate thinks. Another important thing is that there is an unknown number of possibilities. Many other things can be beneficial to this method, such as avoiding long lists of responses, avoiding direct questions, cognitive pretesting, etc.
Now, you may ask yourself, what if you do not know the answer to any question? Well, you should not be there at all. If you are applying somewhere, make sure that you are applying to something you understand. All in all, this method gives the opportunity to people to express themselves in the best way possible.
Who is supposed to answer these questions?
As mentioned above, it all comes down to the willingness of the contestants. Studies have shown that all contestants are capable of answering these questions, but only if the question is interesting enough to them.
If the questions are related to their interests, they are going to want to debate more into it; thus, they will express their own opinions on the matter. Other studies have shown that if the respondents are not satisfied with the questions, they are more likely to give out longer answers to these types of questions.
If you want to read more, you should click on this link.
How to code and analyze them?
There are mainly two ways of coding these questions; it is done manually or automatically. Anyway, you choose, it is essential to do one thing, and that is to get the best practices from people that have been working with coding these types of questions for many years.
What you should do when coding these questions is to fight bias. This is important because you do not want to start off with a conceived notion. You should always make sure to emerge themes or categories from any given data rather than pre-defining them in advance.
The next thing that you should do is to provide coverage. What this means is that the code frame should always cover a vast range of categories that are contrasted. What most people do not do but should do is to ensure consistency. If you make new categories, you should always analyze the older ones just so you can have consistency.
In this topic, it was mentioned the two ways of coding and it is going to be talked a bit more about it. When it comes down to coding open-ended questions, manual coding has been around for many years. There are many experts in this type of coding because it is the oldest way of doing so.
What they do is they code free-text responses with more categories, or even one can be good enough. If you do not have any experience in this field, you can always hire professionals to help you.
On the other hand, automated coding has become popular only in recent years. This way of coding includes text analysis, where many computer algorithms are implemented to do these tasks. Even data scientists are working on coding them and storing them with the use of libraries.
Article by Vishal
Vishal Gaikar is a professional blogger from Pune, India. If you like this post, you can follow him on Twitter.
