Use open-ended questions to get the right answer set

Posted on Tue, 11/06/2007 - 20:53 by Steve Oriola
Writing good survey questions is not easy. You want to ask the question in a way that gives you valuable information. You also want to make the survey questions easy to respond to. The best way to do that is to come up with a short, yet comprehensive list of answers that people can choose from. Therein lies the difficulty.

Since the purpose of the survey is to better understand a particular subject or issue, how can you be sure that you're thinking of the right answer options? My favorite way out of this dilemma is to write a survey with open-ended questions. I invite about 5% of my prospective survey takers to take this open ended survey. This gives me a manageable amount of feedback to review.

I take the answers I received and group them based on similarity and then use that grouping to write my answer options for the question. When I do this, the results of my second survey sent to the other 95% of the people on my list is more easily interpreted. And, in the case that I didn’t cover an answer, I still provide a place for respondents to comment.

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