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Squeezing More from Your Open-Ends

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lemon squeezeA perennial problem with open-ended survey questions is that respondents are lazy.  It takes time and effort to think of good answers.  And if the survey is self-administered online or on paper, it takes time and effort to write them out.

But there are several things a savvy researcher can do.  One of them is to think carefully about answer box formats.  If you want respondents to tell you three things they like about your ad concept, then give them three answer boxes.  If you want them to list all brands in a category that come to mind, give them a whole page of boxes, not just one big box.

This bit of savvy advice is based on a recently published article in the Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology.  The research found that “respondents use cues from the answer box format of list-style open-ended questions to infer what the questionnaire designer expects from them as appropriate answers.”

More specifically, the research found that on brand awareness questions, if  you offer multiple small boxes instead of one big box:

1.  Respondents will spend more time on the task

2.  Respondents will name more brands

3.  Respondents will name more lesser-known brands

This is a simple technique you can implement to encourage your survey respondents to give more.  There are other techniques you can use as well; the articles listed below describe some of them.  Need even more?  Give us a call at (312) 348-6089.  We give full, detailed, thoughtful answers to all of your open-ended questions.

By Joe Hopper, Ph.D.

Versta Research Website

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How to Get Outstanding Open-End Responses

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The Pitfalls of Auto-Coding Text Responses

Killer Quotes from Research Respondents

Three Ways to Improve Online Verbatim Data


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